Omega

chapter 20

On board the al-Jahani, in hyperflight.

Tuesday, June 10.

THE NEWS OF Markover’s death had delivered a jolt, reminding everyone on board that the operation on which they were embarked had its unique dangers.

A few members of the research team had known him. Peggy Malachy had worked with him years earlier, and Jason Holder recollected signing a petition that Markover had sent around, though he could not recall the issue. Jean Dionne remembered him from a joint mission years before. “Good man,” she told Collingdale. “A bit stuffy, but you could depend on him.”

Collingdale had been on a weeklong flight with him once. He remembered Markover as aggressive, arrogant, irritating. Although he wouldn’t have admitted it even to himself, he was relieved he wouldn’t have to deal with him at Lookout.

THE LINGUISTS WERE getting torrents of raw data from the Jenkins. They’d broken into the language, and were in the process of constructing a vocabulary that by then numbered several hundred nouns and verbs. They understood the syntactical structure, which resembled Latin, verb first, noun/subject deeper in the sentence. They had the numeric system and most of its terms down. (Base twelve, undoubtedly a reflection of the fact that Goompahs had twelve digits.) They knew the names of about forty individuals.

The city that Markover had called Athens was Brackel in the language of its inhabitants.

Brackel.

Whatever else you could say for the Goompahs, they had tin ears.

The residents of Brackel were Brackum. Well, Collingdale thought, there you are.

Two other cities for which they had names were Roka and Sakmarung. The planet, their word for Earth, was Korbikkan, which (as at home) also meant ground. They lived in it, and not on it, implying they had no sense of the structure of things. Their name for the sea was bakka, which also meant that which is without limit.

They had a complex conjugal system of shared spouses, which Collingdale and his team of specialists hadn’t quite figured out yet. Brackel seemed to be home to approximately twenty-eight community groups. Spouses within a group had free access to each other, although it appeared they settled on a favorite or two, and only had relations with others to keep up appearances or morale or some such thing. It wasn’t an area in which Collingdale was interested, but some of his experts were already making lascivious jokes.

Offspring from one group could, on maturity, become a member by marriage of specified other groups. But the choices were limited to prevent genetic damage. It was a cumbersome system, which would, he suspected, eventually give way to monogamy. Holder wasn’t so sure, pointing out that similar systems were still in use in remote places at home.

They had not established whether the same system was in use in the other cities, although preliminary evidence suggested it was.

Life among the Goompahs seemed to be pretty good. Apparently, the crops all but grew themselves. Digger Dunn was still dithering about getting a reliable climate analysis, but it looked as if the temperatures ranged from cool to balmy.

The Goompahs talked a lot about politics, leading Holder to conclude that the general population participated in government. Whether the city was an aristocracy or a democracy, or some variant, was still impossible to say. Although some of Collingdale’s people were entranced at the prospect of finding out, it was not a detail that particularly concerned the director.

And that fact puzzled him. He’d thought that his reason for coming, aside from managing a rescue, was to learn about the Goompahs. But he’d lost interest. In fact, he’d begun to suspect that he’d never really cared all that much. He gradually began to realize that he’d come because of the cloud.

His xenologists had insisted from the beginning that he warn the Jenkins people not to establish contact with the natives under any circumstances. They all seemed to think nobody else should say hello, but that it was okay for them to do it because only they knew how to do it correctly.

He’d warned them that policy had not changed to the degree that they should expect to sit down over dinner with the natives. (They still hadn’t agreed on an appropriate term of reference for the aliens. Goompahs set his teeth on edge. Brackum was limited to the inhabitants of Brackel. Peggy Malachy liked to call them Wobblies. Collingdale began trying to encourage the use of Korbs.)

Shelley Baker invariably looked amused when they talked about limiting or barring communication. She said nothing in front of the others, but she’d told him privately that the omega made all the difference. “We’re going to have to talk with them,” she said. “If nothing else, we have to be able to tell them to get out of the cities.”

MARY SENT A message every couple of days. She kept them short, well within Academy guidelines. She’d tell him about a show she’d seen, or how she’d run into some old school friends downtown. Or how she still went to Chubby’s, but the sandwiches had tasted better when he was there.

He replied in kind. He was busy, and sometimes couldn’t think what he wanted to say. But he enjoyed switching on the system and imagining she was in the room with him. He told her about the work they were doing, how he’d been tweaking the visuals they were going to use to get rid of the cloud. And that he was trying to learn the Goompah language. “We can make the sounds,” he said. “Judy says we got lucky. Now it’s just a matter of doing the work.”

Seeing her, listening to her voice, sometimes happy, sometimes wistful, fed his hatred for the omega. He took to spending time in the VR tank, where he conjured up the view from Lookout, as it would be in late November, when the cloud would be prominent in the skies. Vast and ugly, torn by its own gee forces, it would be coming in over the western ocean, visible only at night, rising shortly after the sun went down, growing larger and more terrifying with the passage of time.

It was obvious Judy was worrying about him. She occasionally joined him in the tank, when she thought he was getting too moody. “The clouds aren’t personal,” she insisted. “Whoever, whatever, did this, it happened a long time ago. Who knows what the purpose was? But I’ll bet, when we find out, if we ever find out, we’ll discover it’s more stupidity than venom.”

“You’re kidding,” he told her, as they stood together on the shore near Brackel and looked up at the omega. He saw it as pure malice. And while he was not a violent man by nature, he would happily have taken the lives of the engineers that had put these things together.

But she was serious. “Whatever it was, it’s long dead. The machinery keeps working, keeps pumping them out, but the intelligence behind them is gone. And it couldn’t have hated us. It didn’t know us. It just—” She stopped. “I’m not sure I’m making sense.”

He gazed up at the cloud, quietly unfolding across the star fields. “Judy,” he said, “I don’t know how else to explain these things other than as an act of pure evil.”

“Well,” she said. “Maybe.” She shrugged and looked out to sea, and he thought how attractive she was. More so there on the beach than in the confines of the ship. He wondered at the capability of women to take on part of the beauty of their surroundings.

But he could not keep his eyes long off the cloud. He yearned to be able to reach up and strike the thing out of the sky.

JUDY WAS BARELY out of her twenties. She had a Ph.D. in anthropology, specializing in primitive religions, from the University of Jerusalem. Her reputation for linguistic capabilities had brought her to Hutch’s attention. Collingdale had heard she was also a pretty good equestrienne.

Her parents, she told him, had been horrified when she volunteered for the mission. Nobody else crazy enough to go. Get yourself killed. There’d been a pretty big blow-up, apparently.

At her worksite she’d mounted pictures of several of the Goompahs for which they had names. Goompahs used a string of names, of which two defined the conjugal group and the region of birth. The others appeared to be individual and arbitrary.

To Collingdale they all looked alike. But Judy laughed and said there were clear differences. This one had a large chin, that one a weak mouth. She even claimed she could distinguish personality traits and moods: Kolgar was gruff, while Bruk was amiable.

She’d mastered enough of the language to be able to carry on a respectable conversation, though not with Collingdale, who’d fallen far behind. He could commit some of the words to memory, and knew how to say hello, fish, cold, night, home, and another dozen or so terms. If he were stranded he might even have been able to ask for the local equivalent of coffee, which was a brewed hot drink called basho. Sounded Japanese to his ears.

But she encouraged him and told him he was doing fine. And he took pride in the fact he was light-years ahead of his peers. Bergen, Wally Glassner, and the others couldn’t have gotten the time of day.

They were still having trouble with the syntax. But there was plenty of time, and Judy was more than satisfied with their progress, so Collingdale was pleased.

They were at a point at which most of the data coming in from the Jenkins was repetitious, but Judy’s team was becoming more practiced at setting it aside, at finding the constructions that helped them solve the inner workings of the language.

There were all kinds of sites where they’d have liked to see pickups. But the quantity of units was limited. And they were all in Brackel. They had only verbal descriptions of the other cities.

Requests to Digger not only indicated target sites, but also designated which surveillance units could be moved elsewhere. A transmission still took several days to reach the Jenkins, and moving the pickups around took more time. It was cumbersome, but they were making progress.

There was no information yet about local religions. Collingdale had no idea how old the civilization on the isthmus was. Had it been preceded by something else? What did the Goompahs know about the rest of their world?

Digger wanted to know whether he should use his own judgment about the pickups. Plant them, let them sit for a bit, and then move them around rather than wait for instructions.

Yes, you nit. Do whatever you can to get as much coverage as possible.

But that didn’t work out either. A feed that had become interesting suddenly went dark and by the time they could direct him to get it back up and working, the line of inquiry had dried up.

Most of the cities seemed to have a library. They were getting pictures of Goompahs sitting down to read, but Collingdale and Judy couldn’t see the materials. Invade one of those places, they told Digger. We need to find out what they’re reading. Send pictures of the scrolls. Sometimes he wondered whether Digger had any imagination at all.

Judy made suggestions where the surveillance units might be placed for maximum effect. She pointed out that they’d gotten next to nothing whatever from the interior of the temple. Nothing ever happened on the main platform, the altar, whatever it was, except that one of the worshipers occasionally got up and stood on it in a pious manner and looked around.

Inevitably they ended back on Collingdale’s beach, where he stared out at the dark sea—the wine-dark sea—while she stood by to ensure he wasn’t alone.

A few cities along a seacoast. Widespread literacy. Sailing vessels. A peaceful society. Probably participatory government. Apparently universal education. Not bad, actually.

He wondered whether the human race had just encountered its first serious competitor. The Korbs would need an industrial revolution and all that. But if they could skip the Dark Ages, and the assorted other imbecilities that people had come up with, they might leapfrog ahead pretty quickly.

And the omega. They’d have to get past that too.

“They’ve got a lockup,” Judy announced without warning.

“A jail? How do you know?”

“Somebody got tossed in.”

“Do you know why?”

“No. I think he was trying to steal some fish. Got caught, the shopkeeper chased him down, and somebody came and took him away. So there is a police presence of some sort.”

They also had a series of terms for what seemed to be political leaders. There was a kurda, and a krump, and a squant. But they were unable to get equivalences for them. They were in charge, but whether a kurda was a king, a representative, a ward boss, or a judge, there was simply no way to know.

WITH SO MANY young people on board, social life on the al-Jahani was active. It didn’t usually get rowdy, but there was a fair amount of partying and VR games. The older members of the mission, anxious to get away from the noise, took to congregating in a storage area on C Deck, near the shuttle bay, where they talked about the mission, their careers, and the omegas. They worried about whether they’d get to Lookout in time, and reminisced about the old days.

Collingdale had traveled with most of them before. And if they’d become cranky over the decades, they were nonetheless good people. They’d endured months and sometimes years digging on Quraqua and Pinnacle, or cataloging the systems within a couple of hundred light-years of Earth until we knew the diameter, weather, and mass of every world in the neighborhood. A couple had been at Deepsix when it had blooped into the gas giant Morgan. They had a history of getting results. Melinda Park, for example, had served four years on Serenity, a space station assignment that would have driven Collingdale completely around the bend. But she’d directed efforts to determine the laws of planetary formation and had won an Americus for her efforts.

Ava MacAvoy, who’d been with him at Moonlight, was there. And Jean Dionne, with whom he’d once conducted a romance that had been a kind of shooting star, lots of flash and then an eruption and nothing left. Except regrets. Nevertheless, or possibly because of that fact, they’d remained friends. Their captain was Alexandra Kyznetsov, who had also been at Moonlight, lobbing nukes from this very ship. She’d been embarrassed at the way things had turned out and assured Collingdale immediately after departure that she’d brought no bombs this time.

It would not have been correct to say that during the passing months they’d become a tightly knit group. In fact they didn’t agree on much. Some thought the basic mission was to study the society on Lookout (before it got obliterated?) while others thought the intent of the mission was to get ready to set up a rescue effort. Although how the latter was to be done was unclear.

Some argued that, under the circumstances, they should forget the Protocol and make contact with the Goompahs, while others maintained it would do far too much harm. There was disagreement over how the basic research should be handled, who should be allowed down on the surface, what the priorities were, and how best to make decent coffee using the onboard equipment.

“Basho,” said Collingdale.

“I’m sorry?” said Elizabeth Madden, who’d been complaining about the coffee in Alexandra’s presence, but who had no idea what Collingdale was talking about.

“Basho. Coffee. You’ll have to get the language right if you want to prosper on the surface.”

Madden was the most outspoken of those who wanted to maintain the isolation policy. She was a small woman who always spoke in a level tone, never got excited, and seemed to have a mountain of facts to support any position. There was a quality in her manner that implied, without her saying so, that her opponents merely needed to hear the reality of a situation to see the foolishness of their position. She occupied the Arnold Toynbee chair at King’s College, London. Her husband Jerry, also a xenologist of considerable reputation, had accompanied her, and usually led the opposition.

She was alarmed when she first heard that Judy Sternberg was having the pickups moved around.

“Unconscionable risk,” she maintained. “We were lucky the first time. It would have been prudent to wait until we were on the scene.”

Judy shrugged. “I can’t see that any harm might be done.”

She closed her eyes and sighed. “If the Korbs so much as become aware that we exist,” she said, “their entire worldview will change.” Their natural development would be set aside, she argued, and they would become dependent, at least in their philosophy and probably in their development of technology.

“Ridiculous,” said Judy.

“They’ll wind up on reservations! There has never been an exception to the general law.”

Madden didn’t explain which law, but there was no need to do so. Somebody-or-other had laid down a manifesto that a civilization could not survive collision or integration with, or even a bit of jostling by, a more advanced culture.

“If we don’t intervene directly,” said Judy, “there won’t be enough of them left for a reservation.”

“That’s an exaggeration, Judy. You know it and I know it. We’ve survived at least one of these things at home, and other worlds have survived God knows how many. It kills off individuals, and that’s regrettable. But it will not kill off the culture.” They were sitting in the area they’d fixed up in cargo, which someone had nicknamed the Oxford Room. “Our obligation is to save the culture. To give them their chance to evolve.”

Well, maybe she was right. But Lookout was not a global civilization. It was a handful of cities, positioned on a narrow strip of land between major oceans. The cloud was coming and when the destruction was over, maybe the archeologists could go in and look at what was left of the culture. And the xenologists could go home.

RAW DATA POURED in. Collingdale sent his analyses on to Hutchins, with information copies to the Jenkins.

The package went out daily at the close of day. They were, he thought, making excellent progress.

He had just finished sending off a message to Mary, exulting over how well the effort was going, when Judy asked him to come by the workroom.

He hurried up to the B Deck conference room that the linguists had taken over. Judy was there with a couple of her people, Terry MacAndrew from the Loch Ness area, and Ginko Amagawa from Yokohama.

She handed him a printout. “We just found this,” she said. “Thought you might be interested. It’s from a conversation on a park bench.”

It was in Goompah, but using English letters. Nobody tried to translate it for him, and Collingdale felt the force of the compliment. He had to translate it however word by word:

“ROM, HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT HARKA AND KOLAJ ARE MISSING?”

“YES. THREE NIGHTS NOW. WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK. I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF ANYTHING LIKE THIS.”

“IT SCARES ME.”

“IT SCARES ME TOO, ROM.”

Collingdale’s first thought was that two of the young ones had been kidnapped. Or two lovers had eloped. Did Goompahs elope?

“We’re not sure what Harka and Kolaj refer to. But we think they may be stars.”

“Stars?”

Judy glanced at Ginko. Ginko’s eyes were dark and worried. “We think they’ve just seen the cloud, Dr. Collingdale.”

ARCHIVE

Nobody here can understand how it happens that a race virtually confined to a limited land area, sealed off both north and south by natural impediments, has managed to maintain what is clearly a peaceful existence. There are no armies, no walls, no battle fleets. No indication that anyone even carries weapons other than what might be expected for hunting purposes.

We are not yet certain, but early indications suggest the cities are independent, that there is no formal political framework, but that somehow they coexist peaceably.

This framework is difficult to understand in light of the fact that the Goompahs are clearly carnivores. Hunters. They do not appear to have a history extensive enough to explain the amity in which they live. We would also like to understand why they find Digger such a fearsome creature.

We share the sense of loss at Jack’s death. But I would be remiss not to commend Digger and Kellie, without whom we’d be flying blind.

— David Collingdale

Hyperlight Transmission

June 9

chapter 21

On the ground at Lookout.

Friday, June 13.

…INVADE ONE OF the libraries. We need to find out what they’re reading. Get access to the scrolls.

The Frances Moorhead arrived in the middle of the night with the industrial-size lightbender, which would hide the lander. Kellie and Digger thanked the captain, and transferred Jack’s body. That was an ordeal that reopened wounds and left Digger wandering aimlessly through the ship after the Moorhead had gone.

He’d received a sympathetic message from Hutchins shortly after the incident. She was sorry, shared their grief, don’t blame yourself, bad things happen. But she didn’t know everything, didn’t know Jack had warned him to stop, didn’t know Digger was going to lift the coin.

“She never really asked for the details,” he told Kellie. “She must know I left stuff out.”

“I’m sure she does. But the Academy needs heroes.” She looked at the lightbender and looked at him. “She’s giving you a chance, Dig.”

Kellie saw to it there was no time for him to sit around feeling sorry for himself. They tied the unit into the lander’s systems, connected field belts around the hull, ran a successful test and headed for the surface.

KELLIE TRUSTED HIM. Had it been someone else, she might have been frightened. The prospect of being caught out there alone, weeks away from the nearest base, with a guy who was coming emotionally apart, would have been unnerving for anyone. But she’d known Digger a long time.

This wasn’t their first flight together, and though she’d been aware from the beginning of his interest in her, she hadn’t taken him seriously until the beginning of this mission. She wasn’t sure what had changed. Maybe she’d gotten to know him better. Maybe it was that he hadn’t embarrassed her by becoming persistent. Maybe it was that she’d simply realized that he was a good guy. In the end, she’d come to enjoy just being with him.

But the way in which Jack had died was a nightmare. And the ironic aspect of the event was that she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have made a grab for the coin herself. Mistakes happen. And if you get unlucky, there’s a price to be paid. It doesn’t make you culpable, she told herself, and occasionally, when it seemed necessary, Digger.

She was glad to see the library request come through. It provided a challenge and gave him something else to think about.

THE MOST ACCESSIBLE means of entry into the center of Brackel was through the harbor. But she couldn’t simply set down in the water, even with the lightbender field protecting the lander. Its treads would create twin depressions in the water, an effect that would startle any witnesses. So they waited until the sun went down. When it was reasonably dark, Kellie came in over the harbor, past a vessel anchored just offshore (there was a light in a forward cabin but no other sign of life), and descended a few meters away from a deserted pier.

Digger was beginning to feel like an old hand. He slipped into the gear, turned on the Flickinger field, switched on his converter, put his laser cutter into a pocket, and activated the lightbender. Kellie climbed into her own gear and followed him out the airlock onto the pier.

He looked back at the lander. Its ghostly silhouette rose and fell in the incoming tide. Kellie directed Bill to move it well out into the harbor. They watched it go, then turned toward the city.

It was a bright, clear night. The big moon was overhead; the smaller one was rising in the west. It wasn’t much more than a bright star.

Digger led the way through the harbor area. Lights were going on, cafés filling up, crowds roaming the streets. They had four pickups, two for the library, and two, as Digger said, “for a target of opportunity.”

The target of opportunity showed up when they passed the two structures they’d thought of as theaters-in-the-round. Both were busy. Oil lamps burned out front, signs were prominently displayed, and the locals were pushing their way in.

“Care to stop at the theater first, my dear?” asked Digger.

“By all means,” she said. “We can do the library in the morning.”

They chose one and took pictures of the signs, several of which featured a female Goompah with a knife, her eyes turned up. (When a Goompah turns those saucer eyes to the heavens, one knew that great emotions were wracking his, or her, soul.)

They waited until most of the patrons were inside before they joined the crowd.

The circular hall was three-quarters filled. Most of the patrons were in their seats; a few stood in the aisles holding conversations. Most Goompah conversations were animated, and these were no exception. That they kept looking toward the stage indicated that they were discussing the show. Stragglers continued to wander in for several minutes. Kellie and Digger stayed near the entrance, where they had room to maneuver.

Oil lamps burned at the doors, along the walls, and at the foot of the stage.

“What do you think?” asked Kellie, pressing a finger against the pickups, which were in his vest.

“I think Collingdale would kill to have a record of whatever’s about to happen.”

“My feelings exactly.”

They waited until everyone seemed to be settled, then picked an aisle, moved in close, and squatted. An attendant went through the auditorium extinguishing some of the lamps. There was no reasonable place to attach a pickup, so Digger simply aimed it manually.

THE SHOW WAS a bloodbath.

At first Digger thought they were going to see a love story, and there was indeed a romance at the heart of the proceedings. But all the characters other than the principals seemed angry with everyone else for reasons neither of the visitors could make out. An early knife fight ended with two dead. Swords were drawn later and several more perished. One character was hit in the head and thrown off the stage to universal approval.

The action was accompanied by much music. There were musicians down front, manning wind and string instruments and a pair of drums. Onstage, the characters danced and sang and quarreled and made love. (Much to Digger’s shock, there was open copulation about midway through. The audience, obviously moved, cheered.) Later there was what appeared to be a rape. With Goompahs it was hard to be sure.

The music jangled in Digger’s ears. It was all off-key. It banged and rattled and bonked, and he realized there was more to it than the instruments he’d seen. There was something like a cowbell in there somewhere, and noisemakers clanked and clattered.

Eventually, the female love interest gave in to temptation a second time, either with a different character, or with the same character wearing different clothes. Digger couldn’t make it out until the end, when three apparently happy lovers strode off arm in arm. Hardly anyone else was left standing. The audience pounded enthusiastically on any flat surface they could find.

“Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending,” said Kellie.

Romeo, Frank, and Juliet, Digger thought. Nevertheless, in his view, a distinct improvement. Digger liked happy endings.

The crowd drifted out. Some headed for cafés, others strolled into connecting streets. Everyone was on foot. No carriages rolled up, no horses.

It had gotten late. There was a sundial in front of the theater, but that obviously wouldn’t work at night. He wondered how the locals scheduled a show. When the moon touched the sea? Sunset plus time for dinner plus time to walk in from a half kilometer away?

Anyhow, he had gotten it all on the pickup. They returned to the lander and sent it off to the al-Jahani, wondering how it would be received there.

THEY STAYED IN the lander, in the harbor, overnight. It was hard to sleep, because it was the middle of the afternoon their time.

Despite everything, despite his culpability in Jack’s death and his sympathy for the Goompahs, he had never felt more alive. Kellie had fallen into his arms like ripe fruit, and he knew beyond any doubt that whatever happened out here he would take her home with him.

She lay dozing inside a blanket while he considered how well things were turning out and fought off attacks of guilt over the fact that he felt so good. It was possible his career might be over; he might be sued by Jack’s family and possibly barred from future missions by the Academy. But whatever happened, he was going to come out ahead.

After a while he gave up trying to sleep and opened a reader. He scanned some of the more recent issues of Archeology Today, then tossed it aside for a political thriller. Mad genius tries to orchestrate a coup to take over the NAU. But he couldn’t stay with it and eventually ran part of the show they’d watched that evening. The Goompahs seemed less childlike now.

“The audience loved it.” Kellie’s voice came out of nowhere.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“More or less.”

“It was all pretty matter-of-fact,” he said. “Nobody seemed shocked.”

She shrugged. “Different rules here.”

“I guess.”

She rearranged herself, trying to get comfortable. “But you know, if I was reading the story line right—it’s hard to be sure of anything—but I thought they reacted pretty much the same way we would have. You could pick out the villain, and they didn’t like him. They approved of the young lovers. Even if there were three of them. They were silent during the killings. Holding their breath, it seemed to me.”

Digger had had the same reaction.

“What did you think of the score?”

He laughed. “Not like anything I’ve heard before.”

THEY WENT TO the library next day. It was a battered L-shaped gray stone building set along two sides of one of the smaller parks just a block from the theater. They found a signboard posted inside the heavy front doors. Several pieces of parchment were displayed, on which someone had listed about two hundred items. “Maybe it’s an inventory of the holdings,” suggested Kellie.

They took a picture and drifted into a large room given over to reading. Nine or ten Goompahs sat at tables, poring over scrolls. A couple more were standing before boards to which notes were attached. (Looking for a ride home?) Another examined a map at the back of the room. A couple of the readers were making notes. To do that, it was necessary to go to the librarian, secure a pot of ink and a pen, and do it right there at his station, where he could watch, presumably to ensure you didn’t have any sloppy habits. You used your own parchment, which was sometimes attached to a piece of wood and resembled a clipboard, and sometimes rolled inside a cylinder.

Digger noticed that the windows were screened with metal crosspieces and supported heavy shutters. Unlike many of the public buildings he’d seen, this one could be locked and bolted at night.

There were two librarians, both male. Both wore black blouses and purple leggings. Otherwise, they were not at all alike. One was older, obviously in charge. He moved with deliberation, but clearly enjoyed his work. He was constantly engaged in whispered conversation with his patrons, helping them find things, consulting a wooden box in which he kept sheaves of notes. None of the material seemed to be in any kind of order, but he kept dipping into it, rummaging, and apparently coming up with the desired item, which he would wave in the air with satisfaction before showing it to those he was assisting.

His name, or perhaps his title, was Parsy.

His aide was equally energetic, eternally hustling around the room adjusting chairs, rearranging furniture, flattening the map, talking with clients. He had something to say to everyone who came or went.

Between them they kept a close watch on the readers. Their primary function, Digger suspected, was to make sure no one got away with a scroll.

Kellie wanted to look at the map. “Back in a minute,” she said. “Don’t go away.” He followed. The map was of the isthmus, and it looked reasonably accurate. The cities were marked and labeled, and he noted the symbols that represented Brackel. The map ended beyond the most northern and southern cities. Terra Incognita. A few islands were included. Digger remembered one, a big one to the west. Utopia, which they were using as a base for the lander, was not on the map, although it should have been. Beyond the big western island, he thought, lay the edge of the world.

He took more pictures, then resumed wandering through the room, looking over the rounded shoulders of the readers. The texts were, of course, hand-written.

The scrolls were not laid out on shelves, as printed books might have been. They were kept in a back room, secure from potential thieves. A visitor consulted the list at the front door, filled out a card, and submitted it to one of the two librarians, who then retreated into the sanctum sanctorum. Moments later, he emerged with the desired work. Judging by labels, many of the books required multiple scrolls, but it appeared only one scroll at a time could be had. And, of course, nobody checked one out and took it home.

The inner stack was closed off. It was a small room, located immediately behind Parsy’s desk, and sealed off by furniture so that no one could get near it without being seen by him. It had no windows and no other exit, save into a private washroom. Its walls were lined with cubicles, in which lay the scrolls. The cubicles were marked with a few characters. Biography, Digger thought. Northern Isthmus Travel. Literature. Mystery. There were altogether approximately two hundred labeled volumes, comprised of roughly three times as many scrolls.

Digger, maybe for the first time since he’d been a child, took a moment to reflect on the pure simple wonder of a collection of books. Throughout his life he had always had immediate access to whatever book he cared to look at, to whatever body of knowledge he wished to explore. Everything humans knew about the world they lived in was within fingertip reach.

Two hundred books.

Literacy appeared to be widespread. The readers did not seem, in any way he could determine, to belong to a higher class than the Goompahs strolling the streets. He recalled the school he and Jack had come across outside Brackel. Outside Athens.

THEY WERE PLANNING to wait until the place closed, and then begin the recording session. It was late afternoon, they’d been away from the lander for ten hours, and Digger discovered a need to relieve himself. It would have been easy enough had it been dark. Just find a remote street corner, shut the systems off, and go. But it was still daylight. They’d not been using the sacks that allowed one to dispose of waste inside the suit because then it became necessary to haul it around, and neither of them cared to do that. Just organize things properly, Jack had always maintained, and you won’t need it.

Right.

Digger was thinking how he’d like to grab some of the scrolls and run. He entertained an image of a group of scrolls apparently leaping into the air and streaking for the exit on their own.

“You okay?” asked Kellie.

“Looking for a washroom.”

“Good luck.”

He found it at the rear of the building. There was only one for the general public, apparently intended for both sexes. He pushed through the door and entered a small room, equipped with a floor-level drain and some wide benches. No commode. You sat on a bench, if need be. The room was occupied, but only by one individual. Digger waited until it was empty, killed the e-suit, did the deed (listening anxiously for footsteps outside, trying to plan what he’d do if he got caught, knowing he couldn’t just reactivate the unit without making a mess of himself).

But he got through it okay. Just in time, though. The door was opening as he hit the switch. Flickinger field on. Lightbender on. Goompah in the room, standing uncertainly in the doorway, as if he had just seen something out of the corner of his eye.

All kinds of firsts were being set here. First person to watch an alien theatrical production. First to visit a library. First to use a washroom.

He smiled and walked out into the corridor, forgetting that, to an observer, the door opened of its own volition. He realized what he’d done just as he started to close it behind him. Two more Goompahs were coming, one of each sex. The door caught their attention and he moved away from it, leaving it ajar. They looked at it, looked at each other, did the Goompah equivalent of a pair of shrugs, and went in.

Digger returned to the reading room, found a chair toward the rear, and sat down to wait.

CLOSING TIME. THE last of the readers was waddling toward the door. When she was gone, the librarians took a quick look around, straightened chairs, picked up some loose pieces of the hard crackly material that passed for notepaper, and arranged their own stations. Parsy went into the back room, counted the scrolls, opened a logbook, and signed it. His colleague, whose name seemed to be Tupelo, put out the oil lamps, closed and bolted the shutters, and retrieved a wooden padlock from his desk.

Kellie was visibly impressed by it. “They’re not entirely without technology,” she said.

“No big deal,” said Digger. “The Egyptians had them four thousand years ago.”

Tupelo closed the stack room door and lowered a bar across it. Digger had feared they might padlock the room, and he was primed to try to lift the key. But it didn’t happen, and he was feeling that he was home free when someone knocked at the front door. The librarians opened up and a small, evil-looking beast was led in on a leash. The creature looked like an undersized pig, except that it had fangs, fur along its jaws and across its skull, and a line of quills down its back. It snorted and showed everyone a healthy double row of incisors. Its master, a brightly-ribboned female, moved in with it while the two librarians finished checking around to be sure everything was attended to.

“That what I think it is?” asked Kellie.

The animal’s red eyes came to rest directly on Digger, and it commenced to pull at its leash. Its master spoke to it and the thing looked away momentarily and growled. Then its head swung back.

“As soon as she turns it loose,” said Kellie, “things are going to get tense.”

The librarians filed out through the front door. The female looked around the darkened room, apparently puzzled by the beast’s behavior. Digger watched her kneel beside the animal and stroke its neck.

“Our chance,” he told Kellie. He edged toward the stack room, raised the bar, and signaled Kellie to get inside. When she’d gone through, he followed and pulled the door shut.

Simultaneously he heard a shout. Then, unmistakably, the beast was galloping across the reading room. They heard it slam into the stack room door, which Digger was holding shut.

More voices outside. Howling and scraping.

Then someone was tugging on the door. Digger backed away from it, looking around for a weapon, seeing nothing except the scrolls. The commotion outside continued until finally he heard the female’s voice. Kellie produced a pistol and was about to thumb it on when the door opened. But the animal was tethered again.

Parsy held up a lamp and stepped into the room. Tupelo was speaking, probably trying to explain how the bar happened to be in the raised position.

The animal, fortunately, was being held back.

They looked in all directions. Obviously, no one was hiding there. When the animal continued to growl and show its teeth, its master kicked it. The thing whined but quieted. They dragged it clear, the door swung shut and the bar banged down.

“I guess we’re in here for the duration,” said Digger.

“We can cut our way out if we have to,” said Kellie.

They listened to receding voices. Then came the familiar charge across the room by the little pig, and lots of snuffling outside their door. But the thing wasn’t trying to tear it down this time.

Digger heard the front door open and close.

“What was the plan again?” asked Kellie.

The animal whined.

“No problem,” he said. “When they come tomorrow to secure the doggie and open up, we’ll just stroll out.”

The lightbender field faded, and she was standing before him. “Have you considered the possibility,” she asked, “that tomorrow may be Sunday?”

THERE WERE, IN fact, 587 scrolls. They were tagged and divided into fourteen cubicles. Digger set up a lamp and worked one cubicle at a time, taking them out singly, logging the marking on the cubicle and on the tag for each scroll. When they were ready to start, one held the pickup, the other handled the scroll. And they began to record the Complete Available Works of the Goompahs.

Digger once again wished he had command of the language, and promised himself he would learn it, promised himself he’d read at least one of the texts in its original form before he went home.

They were surprised to discover some illustrations: animals and plants, buildings, Goompahs, maps. Other segments might have been mathematical, but since they didn’t know what the local numbering system looked like, or the mathematical signs, they couldn’t be sure (other than some sections devoted to geometry).

The paper used in the scrolls was of a textured quality, appealing to touch, but thick enough to limit the length of the work that could be placed on a single dowel.

The dowels were made of wood or copper. A few of the scrolls were contained within protective tubes that had to be removed before the parchment could be unrolled. The printing itself was simple and unadorned. Like the architecture, Digger observed.

They worked through the night. There was a brief rain storm around midnight. The creature at the door whined once in a while, scratched occasionally, but never went away.

They watched the time, and when they knew the sun had been up for a half hour or so, and could hear the unmistakable sounds of traffic outside, they decided they were pushing their luck, shut down the effort, and put everything back.

In time they heard noises at the front, heard the doors open, and someone took the beast away. It protested, the caretaker protested, and there was much pawing and scratching at the wooden floor. And then everything went quiet for a while. Eventually the stack door opened, courtesy of the younger Goompah, and they passed out into the musty, sunlit reading room.

“I feel as if we owe this guy a good turn,” said Digger.

Kellie was a glowing wraith in his goggles, gliding between chairs and tables. “If we can figure out a way to turn that cloud aside,” she said, “you’ll have done that. And more.” The library was empty save for the aide. “What did you have in mind?”

“When this is over—”

“Yes?”

“—And we know how things stand, I’d like to leave something for him. He’d never know where it came from. A gift from the gods.”

“Leave what, Dig?”

“I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it. These folks like drama.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe something from Sophocles. Translated into Goompah.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

“Are books important, Boomer?”

“Reading them is important.”

“Why?”

“Because they take us places we can’t get to otherwise.”

“Like where, for instance?”

“Like China, when they were building the Great Wall. Or Italy, when they were discovering that the world could be explained rationally. Or Mars when McCovey and Epstein first walked out the door.”

“That sounds pretty exciting, Boomer.”

“There’s someplace else too, that’s especially important.”

“Where’s that? Ohio?”

“Ohio, too. But I was thinking that it’s the only way you have of getting behind someone else’s eyes. It’s the way we found out that we’re really all the same.”

— The Goompah Show

All-Kids Network

May 21

chapter 22

On board the al-Jahani, in hyperspace.

Monday, June 23.

IT WAS THE first day of full-time basic Goompah. The change came easier than anyone would have dreamed. Of the entire group of trainees, only two seemed to be struggling with the spoken languages, and even they could order food, ask directions and understand the bulk of the response, comment that it was going to rain, and inquire whether Gormir would be home in time for dinner.

They’d been speaking Goompah almost exclusively in the workroom since mid-May. And now Judy and her Shironi Kulp, her Elegant Eleven, were ready to excise all English from their vocabularies for the balance of the outbound flight, save when they had something that had to be passed on to the makla. The word meant outsider, she confided to Collingdale. It was the closest they could get to barbarian in Goompah.

They were permitted one sim per day. But teams had been assigned to translate the English so that even the entertainment was offered in the target language. An honor code was in effect, and violators were expected to turn themselves in.

Collingdale was present when Juan Gomez admitted to an infraction within an hour of converting to the new system. Juan explained himself in Goompah, and Collingdale couldn’t follow. Something to do with Shelley. The penalty was mild, a requirement to do an extra translation from one of the Brackel Library texts. A heroic poem, Judy explained.

Collingdale tried to restrict himself to Goompah in the presence of the Kulp. He was making progress, and he enjoyed impressing his young wards. They never ceased looking surprised, and he began to suspect they didn’t have a high opinion of his intellectual abilities, or, for that matter, of those of the Upper Strata in general. “Too locked in to their mental habits to be taken seriously,” Judy said with a perfectly straight face. “Except you of course.”

“Of course.”

“It is a problem,” she said. “People live longer all the time, but they still freeze up pretty early. Flexibility goes at thirty.”

“You really think so?”

“Lost mine last month.”

However that might have been, they called him in on that first full Goompah day and bestowed on him the Kordikai Award, named for an ancient Goompah philosopher famed for constructing what humans would have called the scientific method.

Had his support for them been tentative, that act alone would have won him over. They were the best people he’d ever worked with, young, enthusiastic, quick learners, and, perhaps, most important of all, they believed in what they were doing, saw themselves as the cavalry riding in to help an otherwise-doomed people. When the time came, when the cloud darkened the skies and frightened the wits out of the Goompahs, the Kulp would arrive, one for each of the eleven cities (by then they knew that the southernmost pair were a single political unit), their alienness hidden within Judy Sternberg’s exquisite disguises. They would go in, do a few high-tech magic tricks, claim the gods had sent them to warn of approaching disaster, and urge the inhabitants to clear out. Head for the high ground.

What could go wrong?

“Challa, Dr. Collingdale.” They shook his hand and told him they intended the Kordikai to become an annual award.

BUT SPEAKING GOOMPAH more or less full-time was one thing to talk about and something else to do. The breakfast is good. There’s a fruit bowl on the table. I am reading an interesting book. They had the lines down. And all quite effectively, except, of course, that they really needed to engage with native speakers. As things were, the conversation remained hopelessly superficial. It is nice out. Your shoes are untied. I am a little red pencil box.

“Pay-los, Dr. Collingdale.” Good-bye. See you around. Until next time.

And that’s what could go wrong. There would be all kinds of nuances that they were not going to pick up because there was no one to tell them where they were getting it wrong.

At dinnertime, he went into the dining room. Five of the Kulp were at a corner table. He wandered over and, in his measured Goompah, asked them how it was going.

It was going well.

Had they encountered any problems?

Boka, Ska Collingdale. Friend Collingdale. Mr. Collingdale. Acquaintance Collingdale. Who really knew?

BUT THEY’D LEARNED much since Digger and Kellie had penetrated the library.

The cities were significantly older than anyone had assumed. Their roots went back at least five thousand years. If that were so, how did one explain that they were still sitting on the isthmus? Why had they never expanded into the rest of their world? What had happened to them?

Prior to the foundation of the first city, which the Goompahs believed to be Sakmarung, the world had belonged to the gods. But they had retreated to the skies, and had left the isthmus, the Intigo, which was also their word for world, to the mortal beings, created by a mating between the sun and the two moons; between Taris, who warms the day; Zonia, who brightens the night; and the elusive Holen, who flees and laughs among the stars.

The Goompahs had started with a ménage à trois, and several of the experts suspected there was a connection with the tradition of multiple husbands and wives in each connubial group. Collingdale knew that mythology inevitably comes to reflect the aspirations and ideals of any society.

They’d acquired illustrations of eleven gods and goddesses, and it had not been hard to match them with the sculptured figures in the temple at Brackel. There were deities charged with providing food and wine, laughter and music, the seasons and the crops. They maintained the sea, saw to the tides, controlled the winds, maintained the cycle of the seasons. They blessed the births of new arrivals and eased the final pains of the dying.

Jason Holder pointed out to him that, although their duties were similar to those of earth-born deities, there was a subtle difference. The gods at home had given their bounty as a gift, and might withdraw it if they were miffed, or out of town, or jealous of another deity. The Intigo’s gods seemed to have a responsibility to make provision. It was not quixotic, but rather an obligation. It almost seemed as if the Goompahs were in charge.

Also significant, Holder continued, there was no god of war. And none of pestilence. “All of the deities represent positive forces,” Jason said. But he admitted he didn’t know what to make of that fact, except that the Goompahs seemed remarkably well adjusted.

The artwork from the library texts revealed much about how the Goompahs saw their gods. They did indeed embody majesty and power; but there was also a strong suggestion of compassion. One of the deities, Lykonda, daughter of the divine trio, had wings. And she always carried a torch. So they knew who welcomed mortals at the entrance to the temple. There was as yet no indication that the natives believed in an afterlife, but Jason predicted that, if they did, Lykonda would be on hand to welcome them to their reward.

The cities formed a league whose political outline was vague. But they had a common currency. And neither Judy’s people nor Hutch’s analysts back home found any mention of defense needs. Nor did the available Goompah history, sketchy though it may have been, indicate any kind of conflict that humans would have described as war. Ever.

Well, some intercity disagreements had sent mobs from one town to the outskirts of another, where they threw rocks or, in one celebrated incident, animal bladders filled with dyed water. There had been occasional fatalities, but nowhere was there a trace of the kind of mass organized violence that so marred human history.

There had even been a handful of armed encounters. But they’d been rare, and the numbers involved had been small. Collingdale could by no means claim to have a complete history of the Intigo. Still, this seemed to be a remarkably peaceful race. And a reading of their philosophers revealed a subtle and extraordinary code of ethics that compared favorably with the admonitions of the New Testament.

The Goompah world appeared to be limited to the isthmus and the areas immediately north and south. Their sailing vessels stayed in sight of land. There was no indication whether they’d developed the compass. They had apparently not penetrated more than a few thousand kilometers in any direction from home. They had not established colonies. They showed no expansionist tendencies whatever.

The Goompahs possessed some scientific and engineering ability. Judy’s team had found a book devoted to climatology. Most of its assertions were wrong, but it revealed an underlying assumption that climatic fluctuations had natural causes, and if one could assemble the correct equations and make valid observations, weather prediction would become possible.

Some among them suspected they lived on a sphere. No one knew how they’d figured that out, but a number of references to the Intigo described it as a globe. Occasionally the adjective world-circling was attached to ocean.

The team had recovered and partially translated thirty-six books from the Brackel Library. Of the thirty-six, thirteen could be described as poetry or drama. There was nothing one might call a novel, or even fiction. The rest were history, political science—their governments were republics of one form or another—and philosophy, which had been separated from the natural sciences, itself no small achievement.

THE UPPER STRATA made an effort to join in the spirit of things. They prepared lines and committed them to memory, so the common room filled up with Goompah chatter.

Challa this and Challa that.

Frank Bergen wished everyone mokar kappa. Good luck. Literally, happy stars. They could find no Goompah word for luck or fortune, so they’d improvised. Dangerous, but unavoidable.

When Wally offered a chocolate brownie to Ava, she had the opportunity to deliver her line: “Ocho baranara Si-kee.” I am in your debt.

Ava smiled, and Wally, fumbling pronunciation, replied that her blouse looked delicious.

Jerry Madden told Judy that he hoped she found success in all her endeavors, delivering the line from memory. And getting it right.

She replied that things were going quite well, thank you very much, and that his diction was excellent, rendering the last word in both Goompah and English.

Jerry beamed.

Elsewhere, Peggy got a suggestion from Harry Chin: “When stuck,” Harry told her, “you can fall back on karamoka tola kappa.”

Peggy tried it, beat it up a bit, and finally got it right.

“Excellent, Peg,” he said. “We may draft you into the unit.”

“Of course. And what does it mean?”

“ ‘May the stars always shine for you.’ ”

DINNER WAS SERVED with a Goompah menu, although the food was strictly terrestrial. While they ate, Alexandra, trying to use the language, told Collingdale something. But she butchered it, tried again, and threw up her hands. “You have a message from the DO,” she said, finally.

It was simply a status report. Hutchins had rounded up the assistance of a few more experts in a half dozen fields, and shown them the recordings and the texts from Lookout, and she was forwarding their comments. Her own covering remarks were short and to the point. You might especially want to pay attention to Childs’s observations on the arrangement of the statuary in the temple. Billings has interesting things to say about the recurrence of the number eleven, although there’s probably nothing to it. Pierce thinks he’s isolated a new referent for the dative case. Hope all’s well.

What struck him was that she said it all in Goompah. And got most of it right. Not bad for a bureaucrat. “Alexandra,” he told the captain, “the woman has something going for her.”

Much the same thing happened when the daily transmission came in from the Jenkins.

“David, we got another show for you last evening.” Digger did it in Goompah. Collingdale hadn’t known anybody on the Jenkins was making the effort.

Digger went on to explain they’d recorded a drama for which the al-Jahani already had the script. He smiled out of the screen, signaling that he understood quite well the value of that. An unparalleled chance to tie together the written and spoken versions of the language.

Magnificent, Digger, thought Collingdale.

“We’ve also relocated some of the pickups to Saniusar. They’re all designated, so you won’t have any problem sorting them out. Raw data is included with this package.

“One more thing. I’m trying to translate Antigone into Goompah. But we don’t seem to have the vocabulary. I don’t know how to say glorious, forbidden, fate, brooding, and a bunch more. I’ve included the words. If any of your people have time, I’d appreciate the help.”

Antigone?

Alexandra looked over at him, her forehead creased. “Why?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve no idea, but it sounds like a decent exercise.”

COLLINGDALE WAS IN the shower, preparing to call it a day, when Alexandra’s voice broke in with a general announcement: “Attention, please. This is the captain. We are going to jump back into sublight for a few hours. There is no problem, and no reason to be concerned. But we’ll be performing the maneuver in two minutes. Please get to a restraint.”

Two minutes? What the hell was going on? She sounded calm and reassuring, but that was what most alarmed Collingdale. This was an unscheduled stop, so obviously something was wrong.

“Everyone please find a harness and settle in.”

It struck him that it was probably almost the first back-to-back English sentences he’d heard all day.

“It’s nothing serious,” she said when he called.

“It’s an unscheduled jump, Alex. That sounds serious to me.”

“We’re only doing it as a precaution. Bill picked up an anomaly in the engines.”

“Which engines?”

“The Hazeltines. That’s why we’re making the jump. It’s routine. Anytime they so much as burp, we go back to sublight.”

“In case—”

“—In case there’s a problem. We don’t want to get stuck where no one can find us.”

“What kind of anomaly?”

“Rise in temperature. Power balances.”

He had no idea what that implied. “I thought the engines were shut off while we were in hyperspace.”

“Not really. They go into an inactive mode. And we run periodic systems checks.” She paused. “Actually, we’ve been getting some numbers we don’t like for the last week.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It may not be a problem. On the other hand, we rushed the al-Jahani into service. Maybe before it was ready.”

“We going to be okay?”

“Oh, sure. There’s no danger to anybody.”

“You’re sure?”

“Dave, if there were any risk whatever to the passengers, any risk, I’d shut her down and call for help. Now, get into your bunk. I have work to do.”

HYPERFLIGHT IS A disquieting experience, an apparently slow passage, at about ten knots, through unending fogbanks. For reasons he didn’t entirely understand, he had begun to think of his relationship with Mary in much the same way.

His communications with her had dropped off somewhat. His fault, really. Nothing new ever happened on the al-Jahani, other than the progress they were making understanding the Goompahs. At first he’d told her about that, but her replies suggested the stories about zhokas and temples and Goompah revels were not exactly at the center of her interests.

So now, at least, he had some real news to report. We are back out under the stars, he told her, and they look good. You don’t appreciate them when you see them every night.

He’d been cooped up for more than three months. It was already the longest nonstop flight he’d made, and it would be another half year before they arrived at Lookout. “All sense of movement is gone, though,” he said. “We’re at almost 1 percent of lightspeed, but we seem to be frozen in space.”

Becalmed in an endless sea.

One-third of the way to Lookout. He tried to say it aloud in Goompah, but he didn’t know how to express fractions. Or percentages. Did Goompahs have decimal points?

They must if they’d designed and built the temple.

And his mind ran on: How would you say jump engines in Goompah? Molly was jump. No reason he couldn’t use it as an adjective. And a machine, a mechanism, like the hand-cranked pump they used to get water into their plumbing system, was a kalottul. Hence molly kalottuls, literally jump machines. Without their molly kalottuls, how long would it take to get to Brackel?

It occurred to him that he was putting all this into the transmission. But it would scare her, even though he’d assured her there was no danger. Still, he went back and deleted it. He finished up, telling her they would be on their way again shortly. And that he missed her.

He didn’t tell her that he thought he was losing her. That he felt every mile of the void between them. Not the void as it was counted in light-years. But as in distant, remote, hidden.

The laughter was gone.

When he’d completed the transmission and sent it off, he went back to the problem he’d set himself. How long to travel to Lookout at current velocity?

They were still about eighteen hundred light-years away. At one light-year per century.

Better have a good book ready.

Alexandra came back on-line: “Dave, you can tell your people we’re okay. Just running some tests now. We’ll be getting under way again within an hour.”

“We’re clear?”

“Well,” she said, “we’ve got some worn valves and a feeder line, and the clocks have gotten out of sync. We’ve checked the maintenance reports, and they never got to them in port.”

His first reaction was that heads would roll. And it must have shown when he told her that he hoped they’d be able to get to Lookout without any more problems.

“You can’t really blame the engineers, Dave. Everything was being rushed to get us out of there. Actually, it should have been okay for a couple more runs. But you can never really be sure. I’m talking about the valves and the feeder line now. The clocks we’ve already taken care of. And I’m replacing the line. The valves, though, are something else. Heavy work, in-port stuff. We can’t do much about them, except take it easy on them the rest of the way.”

“How do you take it easy on a jump engine?” he asked.

“You say nice things to it.”

“Alex, let me ask you again—”

“There’s no risk to the ship, David. These things are engineered so that at the first hint of a serious problem it jumps back into sublight and shuts itself down. Just as it did this morning.” Her voice changed, became subdued. “Whether we get to Lookout or not, that’s another story.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

“How far is the sky, Boomer?”

“It’s close enough to touch, Shalla.”

“Really? Marigold said it’s very far.”

“Only if you open your eyes.”

— The Goompah Show

Summer Special, All-Kids Network

June 21

chapter 23

On board the Heffernan.

Friday, June 27.

“ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY PICKING up inside the omega,” said Sky. It was getting close to the hedgehog.

“Estimated time fifty minutes,” said Bill. The rate of closure was just over 30 kph.

The Heffernan had backed away to 80 million klicks, the minimum range set by Hutchins. They were watching by way of a half dozen probes running with the omega, and they were maintaining jump status so they could leave in a hurry if the need arose. That used a substantial quantity of fuel and would require all kinds of refitting when they got back to Serenity. But that was the point: They were making sure they would get back.

“I don’t know how big this is going to be,” Sky told Em, “but they’ve got my attention.”

The overhead monitor carried a picture of the omega as seen from the monitors, a wall of churning mist streaked with bursts of incandescence. The cloud was usually dark and untroubled, but now it almost seemed as if the thing was reacting to the chase. Sky was glad to be well away from it.

Other displays provided views of the hedgehog and the forward section of the omega. He watched the range between them growing shorter. Watched the flow of black mist across the face of the cloud, the electricity rippling through its depths.

Emma refused to commit herself about what would happen. “Large bang,” she said. Beyond that, the data were insufficient. It was all guesswork. That was why they were out here doing this, to find out.

The cloud seemed almost to have a defined surface. Like a body of water rather than mist. Sky had looked at some of the visuals from researchers who had snuggled up against omegas and even on a couple of occasions penetrated them. The clouds looked thick enough to walk on.

A flash of lightning, reflected through the monitors, lit up the bridge. The pictures broke up and came back. “Big one,” he said.

The hedgehog had seemed enormous when the thruster packages had closed in on it two months before. Six and a half kilometers wide. Skyscraper-sized spines. Seen against the enormous span of the omega, it might have been only a floating spore.

More heavy lightning.

“Bill,” said Sky, “let’s buckle in.”

The AI acknowledged, and the harnesses descended around them.

“You know,” said Emma, “about twenty years ago they towed an old freighter up to one of these things and pushed it inside. One of the Babcock models. Looked like a big box.”

“What happened?”

“It got within about twenty klicks before a bolt of lightning took it out. All but blew it apart.”

“At twenty klicks.”

“Yep.”

“Won’t be long for our guy.” He tried to relax. Theirs was an unsettling assignment. God knew they were far enough away to have plenty of warning, and they could jump out of danger. But Hutch had explained there was a risk, they just didn’t know, she would understand if they’d just as soon pass on the assignment. In case the worst did happen, they were maintaining a moment-to-moment on-line feed to Serenity.

The range shortened to twenty kilometers, the range of the freighter, and then to fifteen. The cloud flickered, and Sky could have sworn he heard a rumble, but that was, of course, impossible, so he didn’t say anything but just watched the gap continue to close.

At twelve klicks Bill reported that electrical activity inside the cloud had increased by a factor of two over its normal state.

At ten, a lightning bolt leaped out of the roiling mist and touched the hedgehog. Embraced it.

One of the imagers went out. “I think it hit the package, too,” said Emma.

The hedgehog was by then so close that none of their angles showed separation. It was almost into the cloud.

A second bolt flickered around the hedgehog, licked at it, seemed to draw it forward. The mists churned. And the hedgehog slipped inside.

The pictures coming from the probes showed nothing but cloud. He checked the time. Sixteen forty-eight hours. Adjust for signal lag and make it 1644.

They waited.

Ragged bolts ripped through the cloud. It brightened. And then it began to fade.

“Well, Em,” said Sky, “that was something of a bust. Do we go around the other side to see if the hedgehog comes out?”

Emma was still watching the screens. “Not so fast,” she said.

For several minutes the omega grew alternately brighter and darker. Lightning flowed along its surface like liquid fire. Then it began to shine.

And it went incandescent.

One by one, the feeds from the accompanying probes died.

Emma’s eyes looked very blue.

“Bill,” said Sky, “be ready to go.”

“Say the word, Sky.” The engines changed tone.

It was becoming a sun.

“What’s happening to it, Em?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Bill, has it exploded?”

“I don’t think so. The sensors are gone, but the remotes haven’t detected a shock wave.”

“That’s good.”

“Readings are off the scale,” said Em.

He shut down the monitors.

“Sky, do you wish to leave the area?”

“This is goofy,” said Em. “How can we not be getting a shock wave?”

“I have no idea.”

“It shouldn’t be happening. I can’t be sure because everything we have is blown out. But the way it was going, I’d guess it’s putting out the light-equivalent of a small nova. Without the explosion. Without the blast.”

“Is that possible?”

“We’ll see what the measurements look like. Meantime, yes, I’d say we’re watching it happen.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“Think flashbulb,” she said. “And tell Bill we should go.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

. And then there are those who say there is no evidence of the existence of God.

Think about the universe. To understand how it works, one must grasp the significance of light. It is the speed limit, the boundary, the measure of physical reality. We use it as a metaphor for knowledge, for intelligence, for reason. We speak of the forces of light. It is so bound up in our souls that we think of it as the very essence of existence. And yet there is no definable necessity for a physical force that can be observed by sense organs. By eyes. If there is proof anywhere of an involved God, it is the existence of light.

— Conan Magruder

Time and Tide

chapter 24

Woodbridge, Virginia.

Sunday, June 29.

HUTCH SAT ON a rocker on the front deck watching Maureen and Tor tossing a beach ball back and forth. Maureen’s tactic, when she had the ball, was to charge her father, giggling wildly, while he ran for cover. But she inevitably lost control of the ball, popping it in the air or squirting it sideways or kicking it into the rosebushes.

It was an early-summer day, filled with the sounds of a ball game a couple of blocks over, and the barking of Max, their neighbors’ golden retriever, who wanted to get out to play with Maureen, but they weren’t home and nobody was there to unlatch the screen door. So Max whined and barked and snuffled.

The warning from Alex, from the al-Jahani, had come in only moments ago. If you have an alternate plan, you might want to implement.

Yes, indeed. Send in the second team.

Alex was citing a fifty-fifty chance that she could make it to Lookout. But Hutch knew she didn’t really believe that. Captains were expected to be both accurate and optimistic. It was a tradition that probably went back to Odysseus. But it didn’t take much insight to see how she really felt.

The problem was that, other than the Hawksbill, there was no alternate plan. If the al-Jahani broke down, she’d have nothing left but the kite.

Maureen was charging her daddy again, trying to raise the ball over her head. Max was barking. Somebody must have just belted a long one at the ballpark because the crowd was roaring. Maureen tripped over her own feet and went rear end over beach ball. She came up screaming, rubbing her eyes. Tor hurried to her side and scooped her up and returned her to the deck, where Hutch soothed her and checked her for scratches and handed her a glass of lemonade.

“You all right?” Tor asked.

It took a moment before she realized he was talking to her and not to Maureen. “Sure. Why do you ask?”

He sat down beside her and looked at her in a way that said she was wearing all her emotions.

She shrugged. “Maybe it’ll get there. Sometimes I tend to assume the worst.”

Tor nodded. “That’s what I’ve always heard about you.”

Maureen was trying to gulp her lemonade. “Take your time, sweetie,” said Hutch.

Cathie Blaylock came out of her house across the way, waved, picked up something on her deck, and went back inside. Maureen put the lemonade down, said, “Daddy, again,” and started tugging at her father’s knee. Ready to go another round.

“You don’t have anybody you could send after them?” he asked. “Pick them up if they get in trouble?”

“No,” she said quietly, “nobody who could do that and get them to Lookout on time.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Only one thing we can do.”

“And what’s that?”

“Hope our luck holds. And alert Digger that he might have to get inventive.”

WHILE SHE WAS on the circuit, the watch officer told her that the results from the Heffernan had just come in.

Hutch held her breath. “What happened?”

“It lit up,” he said. “The cloud became a torch.”

“Is it a tewk?”

“Too soon to tell. The lab just got it. But they’re pretty excited.”

Two hours later she had confirmation from Charlie. “No question,” he said. “It’s the same spectrogram.”

ARCHIVE

COSMIC MARKER. It now appears that the omega clouds, which have mystified scientists for thirty years, and have spawned a whole new branch of research, may be only an experimental device themselves. Although their purpose remains unclear, according to Dr. Lee MacElroy of the International Research Center in Edinburgh, they may well be part of an experiment gone awry.

— Science News

June 30

LIBRARY ENTRY

Priscilla Hutchins’s Diary

(Reaction to above)

MacElroy never got anything right in his life.

— July 3

chapter 25

Lookout.

On the ground at Brackel.

Wednesday, August 13.

DIGGER HAD BECOME fascinated by the Goompahs, had learned to enjoy the shows, would have gone down every day to mingle with the crowds, to visit the temple, to stand outside the cafés, wishing he could take a place at one of the tables and join in the conversation.

Kellie told him he had cabin fever. But it was more than that. He had never been anywhere before where the inhabitants seemed to enjoy themselves so thoroughly. The nights were filled with laughter and music, and the downtown area played host each evening to happy crowds.

So they took the lander down regularly, and, to the extent they were able, mixed with the locals. Some nights they strolled along the beaches. Others, they went to concerts and visited sporting events, and sometimes they just sat in one of the parks.

Had they been able to set aside the coming storm, and the haunting memory of Jack’s death, it would have been a golden time. Kellie was bright and upbeat. She shared his fascination, had picked up enough of the language to understand much of what was going on around her. And he knew that the day would come when he’d look back on these evenings with a sense of wistfulness and loss.

The omega had by then become visible in the sense that a small patch of stars had gone missing. Occasionally Digger overheard conversations about it, conversations that grew more frequent as the weeks passed and more stars blinked out. The Goompahs admitted to each other that they’d never seen anything like it. There was no record of any such occurrence in the histories, and Digger could see they were getting nervous. He wondered how they’d be when it filled the sky.

The thing rose at night a few hours after sunset, and dropped into the sea just before dawn. And the Goompahs watched.

Where was Melakar?

Where was Hazhurpol?

Behind the cloud, he was tempted to tell them. They’re there, and if you folks know what’s good for you, you’ll start thinking about packing up and heading for the hills.

It might have been the sense that Athens, Brackel, with its theaters and its parks and its scrolls, was approaching its demise: It might have been this realization that drove him through its streets like a ghost, savoring its life and its fragile beauty.

Kellie tried to slow him down. She told him he was becoming obsessed. Maybe, she said, he should think about going back. Going home. Get away from there.

But he would not do that. Wouldn’t consider it.

Kellie thought the kite might work. She knew Hutchins well and had a lot of confidence in her. Digger didn’t point out that Hutchins hadn’t hidden her feeling that the al-Jahani/Hawksbill mission was a long shot.

Now that they could wrap a lightbender field around the lander, it was much easier getting in and out of Brackel. Kellie usually brought them in among the orchards and open ground on the north side of the city. One day, she picked instead a glade a short distance off the isthmus road. “Breaks the monotony,” she said, as the invisible craft descended.

Digger looked at the woods, hunting for Goompahs, but Kellie reassured him. “Bill can’t see anybody down there,” she said. “It’s okay.”

Anybody.

It was, as far as he could recall, the first time.

HE EXPECTED THIS to be an interesting evening. Even more popular among the Goompahs than the theater was an event that was part lecture, part free-for-all. A speaker, usually a visiting authority of one kind or another, attempted to present a point of view on a given topic while the paying customers engaged him in open debate. (Or agreed with him, as the case might be, though, in Digger’s experience, it seldom was.) The visitor might be discussing the health benefits of sunlight, an abstract ethical issue of one kind or another, the merits of a drama that had recently been hooted out of town, or a supernatural visitation she had undergone and which had led to a spiritual awakening and the sure and certain knowledge that the members of her audience were groping through moral darkness and needed to get their act in order. It was all great fun, and Digger was often left in doubt whether any of the Goompahs on either side of the issue were serious. The attendees paid for the privilege, the speakers looked for subjects that would provoke outrage, and everybody had a good time.

They were called sloshen, for which there is no completely accurate English translation. Call it a felicitous quarrel, a happy argument, a glorious difference of opinion.

That evening’s guest speaker, according to notices that had been posted for several days, would be Macao Carista, who was described as a cartographer. Macao was from Kulnar, a city immediately northwest of Brackel. According to the displays, she was widely known throughout the Intigo.

While lingering several days earlier in the lobby of the building that would be used for the presentation, Digger had overheard enthusiastic patrons commenting that she always brought maps of places to which no one had ever journeyed, or sometimes of which no one had even heard.

She used the evenings, apparently, to talk about her travels, describing various kinds of fantastic creatures she’d seen, armored terps as tall as she was, bandars that spat venom at a range exceeding the diameter of the hall (which was considerable), flying solwegs, talking bolliclubs. Last time out, she was reported to have described two-headed Goompahs, which she’d seen on an island in the eastern ocean. One head, she’d said, always spoke the truth, and the other always lied. But you never knew which was which.

And there was Yara-di, the city of gold.

And the bridge across the bottomless Carridan Gap, built by unknown hands, using engineering principles beyond the grasp of any alive today. The bridge was so long that, when she crossed on the back of a berba, it had taken three days.

She’d spoken of the Boravay, the carnivorous forest, from which no traveler, save Macao, had ever returned.

“Sounds like a hell of a woman,” said Kellie.

Goompah, thought Digger. She’s a Goompah. Not a woman.

A strict and formal decorum was observed during the slosh. No hooting, no raised voices. “If the honored speaker would pause for a moment,” one might say, “before we wander farther into confusion—”

It was a cool night. A brisk wind blew off the sea, and management needed several fires to warm the hall to a comfortable level. Macao was obviously popular because Goompahs filled the building, and sat talking quietly to one another while they waited for her to appear.

The audience, about two hundred strong, were seated above the stage, amphitheater style, but restricted to three sides. Kellie and Digger, who had long since planted a pickup near the stage, lurked in the roped-off section, well out of the way. At the appointed hour, two workers pulled a large armchair into view, made a great deal of fuss getting it aimed in the proper direction, and returned with a frame on which Digger assumed Macao would put her maps. Then they brought out a roll of animal skin and leaned it against the side of the chair. They added a table and a lighted oil lamp, and when they had everything arranged to their satisfaction, they scurried off. A bell tinkled, the audience quieted, and a Goompah in red and gold entered from the side. He placed his palms together, the equivalent of bowing to the audience. Digger missed part of his comments, but it came down to, Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, please give a hand to our world-traveling guest, Macao Carista.

The audience rapped politely on any available flat surface, and Macao made her entrance. To Digger’s eyes she was pretty much indistinguishable from the other females. She wore a bright yellow blouse with fluffy sleeves. Green leggings. And animal-hide boots. A gold medallion hung on a purple ribbon about her neck.

“Well,” she said, “this looks like a desperate bunch.” And they were off and running. Macao, it seemed, had just returned from a long overland journey to the north. Through the desert and beyond the jungle where, she claimed, it grew cooler again. She regaled her audience with tales of the mystical Lyndaia, where the gods had placed the first Goompahs; of attack bobbos and the flying groppe, and a giant falloon, which had half a dozen slithery tentacles, and “only last year, as we all know, dragged a full-masted ship to the bottom.” And finally she spoke of Brissie, the city on the edge of forever. “From its towers, one can see the past and the future.” She recognized a hand in the audience. “Please give us your name,” she said.

“Telio. And what did you see, Macao?”

“Do you really wish to know, Telio?”

The questioner had a smashed ear. It was the same Telio he’d seen on the isthmus road what now seemed a long time ago.

“Yes,” he said. “Tell us.”

“Be aware first that I looked to the west, to the past. What’s past is done, Telio. There’s no point gazing that way.”

“So what did you see?”

“Well.” Feigning reluctance. “In the east, I saw a world filled with gleaming cities. Where our ships crossed the seas, and no part of the Intigo was hidden from us. Where travelers could find (something) wherever they went.”

Digger and Kellie were off to one side, but at the edge of the stage. They were getting everything—Macao, Telio, and the audience reaction. Dave Collingdale’s people would love this.

“Orky,” said someone in the audience. A female. “Crossed the seas to where?”

“Oh, yes,” Macao said. “That is the question, isn’t it?” She hadn’t sat down yet in the chair. She was using it instead as a prop. She circled it, gazed at her audience from behind it, leaned on its arm. Played to the expectant silence. “What do you think is on the other side of the sea?”

“There is no other side,” the questioner said. “The sea goes on forever. There may be other islands out there somewhere, but the sea itself has no end.”

“How many believe that?”

About half the hands went up. Maybe a bit more than half.

Macao fastened her gaze on the questioner. “The sea is (something),” she said. “It never stops. That sounds like a lot of water.”

Orky made the rippling sound that passed for laughter among Goompahs. A few pounded on chair arms. “If the sea has an end, what kind of end is it? Does the water simply stop? Is there a place where you can fall off, as Taygla says?” Macao, obviously enjoying herself, flowed across the stage. “It’s really an interesting question, isn’t it? It almost seems there is no satisfactory answer to these things.” She got up, opened the roll of animal skin, and withdrew a map, which she put on the frame. This was an attempt at cartography on a much larger scale than anything they’d seen at the library, which had been limited to the area in and around the isthmus. Her map showed icy regions in the south and deserts to the north, both correct. But it showed a western continent much closer than it actually was, and the big pole-to-pole continent a few thousand klicks east was missing altogether.

But the map contained a shock. “Wait here,” he told Kellie.

“What?” she whispered. “Where are you going?”

He was already up on the stage, moving behind Macao, until he stood directly in front of the map. It reminded him of those sixteenth-century charts that showed personified clouds blowing in different directions, or whales spouting. There were no whales or animated winds on this one. But it did have what appeared to be a graphic of a human being. A male.

It was at the bottom of the chart, riding a winged rhino.

It wasn’t done in sufficient detail to know for sure that it was human. But it was close. Eyes, mouth, and ears were all smaller than a Goompah’s. It had pale brown skin, and it looked a lot better than the natives. Its clothing was standard, a loose-fitting shirt and leggings. And it carried something that looked like a harpoon.

“The sad thing is,” Macao was saying, “we really don’t know whether Orky is right or wrong. We don’t know whether this map is right or wrong.” She advanced without warning in Digger’s direction and he had to scramble clear. Damned things were quicker than they looked.

“It’s one of us,” Digger told Kellie.

“What is?”

“On the chart.”

Macao paused in front of the map, pretending to study it, but they could see her eyes look away while she considered what came next. “In fact, we don’t even know what lies beyond the Skatbrones.” Digger had heard the term before and believed it referred to the mountain range that sealed off the northern continent from the Intigo.

“We come here and talk about all manner of curious beasts, some of which I’ve actually seen, and some of which not. But not one of you knows which is true and which an imagining. And I put it to you that that is not a supportable state of affairs.”

“It’s not a perfect representation,” Digger continued. “Arms are too long. Feet are too much like their own. But it’s close.”

A cup of water and an oil lamp stood on a table beside Macao. Digger decided she looked good in the glow of the lamp. Large malleable ears. Supple arms. Cute in the way, maybe, that a giraffe was cute. If her features were less than classic, they were nonetheless congenial and warm. Her eyes swept across him and seemed for a heart-stopping moment to linger. As if she knew.

More hands were going up. She recognized one.

“I’m Koller. It’s true we can’t see far, Macao; but it’s impious to talk the way you do. The gods (something, something) these things for a reason.”

“And what is the reason, Koller?”

“I don’t know. But we should (something) the will of the gods. You come here and make up these wild tales, and I wonder whether the gods laugh to hear what you say. I’m not sure I want to be sitting this close to you when we all know that a bolt could come through the roof at any moment.”

She smiled at him. “Koller, I think we’re safe.”

“Really? Have you looked at the sky recently?” And with that Koller got up, made his way into the aisle, and left the building.

“Well,” Macao said. “I hope nobody gets (something, but probably ‘singed’) when it happens.”

The audience was silent, except for a couple of nervous laughs.

“The thing is,” said Digger, “it looks like us, but not quite. And it’s sitting on one of those rhinos. But the rhino has wings.”

She had to go look for herself. When she came back she touched his arm. “Never see the day one of those things could get off the ground,” she said.

“That’s what I’m wondering about.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s obviously a mythological beast.”

“So you think—”

“—The guy that looks like us is a mythological beast, too.”

“Hey,” she said, “he looks like you, not me.”

So the next question was, what sort of mythological beast? Considering the way everyone had panicked whenever they’d caught a glimpse of Digger, he thought he could guess.

“I actually have done a fair amount of far traveling,” Macao was saying. “There are a lot of strange things out there. Some strange things in here, too.” She said it lightly, and they pounded their appreciation. “If you go out the front door of this place and turn left, and walk a few hundred paces, there’s a park. It’s called Binlo, or Boplo—”

“Barlo,” someone said from the third row.

Digger suspected she’d known all along. “Barlo.” She tasted the word on her tongue, rolled it around in her mouth, smiled, and took a coin out of her sleeve. “Later this evening, when we’re finished here, if your way home leads through Barlo Park, stop a minute, and consider that this is the world that we know.” She held the coin so it flashed in the lamplight. “This small piece of metal encompasses the entire known world. Where we live. It’s the isthmus, and the land up to the Skatbrones, and the Sunrise Islands, and the Seawards, and the Windemeres, and the shoreline as far as we can see. And south to the Skybreakers. Every place where we’ve walked.” She gazed curiously at it. “And the park is the world beyond. The great darkness into which we’ve cast no light.

“We boast of our maps, and we call ourselves (something). We pretend to much knowledge. But the truth is that we are gathered around a fire”—she lifted the lamp, and watched shadows move across the room—“in a very large and very dark forest.” She turned the stem and the light flickered and died. “I can’t bring myself to believe there’s an infinite amount of water in the world. But maybe I’m wrong.” Someone was trying to get her attention. “No,” she said, “let me finish my thought. We live on an island of light. What extends beyond us in all directions is not the sea, but our own ignorance.” The lamp blinked back on, as if by magic. “Persons like me can come before you with the most preposterous stories, and no one really knows what is true and what is not. In fact, despite everyone’s (something), there really is a falloon. It doesn’t actually gulp down ships.” She moved to the edge of the stage, gazing out over her audience. “As far as I know.”

Digger and Kellie moved cautiously around the stage so they could see better.

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” she continued. “Yet when I tell you about it, you assume that I make it up. Why? Is it because you have evidence to the contrary? Or because you expect me to invent such tales?

“Each year, in the spring, the citizens of Brackel celebrate the founding of their city. Kulnar, which is, of course, older by several hundred years, celebrates in midwinter.”

Several of the audience stood to repudiate her remark. Someone flung a scarf into the air. The question of which city was older was obviously a matter in dispute, and advocates were present for both claims.

Macao let it go on for a bit, then waved them to order. “The truth is, nobody really knows which city is older. But it’s of no consequence.” Her audience quieted. “However—” She drew the word out. “—That we have been here so long, and know so little, even about our own history, is to our discredit.” Digger could hear a cart passing outside.

She held up a scroll. “This is Bijjio’s Atlas of the Known World. It’s accurate, as far as anyone knows. But it is really no more than a few introductory remarks and a lot of speculation.” She paused and took a sip of the water. “We all know the story of Moro, who sailed east and returned from the west.”

An arm went up in back. “My name is Groffel.” The speaker swelled with the significance of what he was about to say. “You’re not going to tell us the world is round, I hope?”

“Groffel,” she said, “it’s time we found out. Found out if there really are lands over the horizon. If there really are two-headed Goompahs. But we need support. We need you to help.”

There were shouts. “The Krolley mission,” someone said. And: “They’re lunatics.” And: “My honored friend should open his mind.”

A voice on the far side, near the wall: “I assume, Macao, we’re talking about contributions.”

She waited until her audience had subsided. “We are talking about an investment,” she said. “We are talking about our future, about whether we will still be wondering about these issues a hundred or six hundred years from now.” She seemed to grow taller. “I don’t say who’s right and who’s wrong. But I do say we should settle the matter. We should find out.

“Three ships will make the voyage. Like Moro, they will travel east, into the sunrise. They will record whatever islands they encounter, and eventually they will return over there.” She pointed toward the back of the auditorium. West. A murmur ran through the audience.

“But why now? When the signs are bad?”

Kellie stirred. “Signs?” she asked. “Does he mean the cloud?”

Another voice: “How long will it take?”

“We estimate three years,” she said.

“And on what is the estimate based?”

“The size of the world.”

“You know the size of the world?”

Another smile. “Oh, yes.”

“And how big is it?”

“It is a sphere, 90,652 gruden around the outside.”

“Really?” This was Orky again. “Not 653?”

“Round it off a bit, if you like.”

Someone in back stood up. “You’ve measured it?”

“In a manner of speaking. I have seen it measured.” She waited for the laughter, got it, let it die away, and added: “I am quite serious.”

“And was it done with a measuring rod?”

“Yes,” she said. “Actually it was done with two measuring rods.” She was completely in control. “Scholars placed rods of identical lengths at Brackel and at T’Mingletep. Who knows how far T’Mingletep is from here?”

“A long walk,” said someone in back. But he didn’t get the laughter he expected, and he sat down.

“That’s right. Although it’s on the western sea, it’s almost directly south of Brackel. And the distance has been measured. North to south, it is precisely 346 gruden.” Digger had seen the term gruden before, but until that moment he had no idea whether it was the length of someone’s arm or a half dozen klicks.

“The shadows cast by the rods were measured through the course of the day. The shadows are longer in T’Mingletep. And the difference in lengths between T’Mingletep and here makes it possible to calculate the size of the world.”

“It’s too much for me,” said Orky.

Whether 90,000 gruden seemed outrageously big or too small to the audience, Digger couldn’t tell. But he knew the experiment, of course. It was similar to the one performed by Eratosthenes, who got very close to the size of the Earth in 240 B.C.

They were silent for a time, and she recognized a big Goompah in the front row. “Klabit,” he said. “Macao, I don’t know whether it’s round or not. But if it really is round, wouldn’t the water run off? Wouldn’t the ships themselves fall off when they got far enough around the curve?”

Macao let them see the question had stopped her. “I don’t know the answer to that, Klabit. But the ground between here and T’Mingletep is curved. That’s established beyond doubt.” She looked out over her audience. “So the truth is, nobody really knows why the water doesn’t run off. Obviously, it doesn’t happen, or there’d be no tide tonight.” (Laughter.) “I admit I don’t understand how the world can be round, but it seems that it is. I say, let’s find out. Once and for all. Let’s send the ships east over the ocean and watch to see from which direction they return.”

Her audience had become restive. Macao left the stage and went out among them. “The mission will cost a great deal of money. The funds from this evening, after I’ve taken my expenses—”

“—of course—” said a voice on the far side.

“—of course. After that, I will contribute the proceeds to the effort. This is your opportunity to become part of the most significant (something) expedition ever attempted by our two cities.

“But they need something more than money. They need volunteers. Sailors.” She paused and looked down at Telio. “It will be a dangerous voyage. Not something for the faint of heart. Not something for the unskilled.”

“I fish for a living,” said Telio.

“Just what they need. I’ll send your name over.”

The audience laughed. Someone commented that Telio was lucky to have gotten such an opportunity.

Macao was back on her stage. She held up her hands. “Velascus talks about the defect each of us has, implanted by Taris, to prevent our being perfect. For you—” she looked at one of the Goompahs off to her left—“it is perhaps too great an affection for money. And for Telio over there, it may be a (something) toward jealousy. For me, perhaps, it is that I have no sense of humor.” (Laughter.) “But for each of us it is there. The individual defect. But there is another flaw that we all share, that we share as a community.

“You remember Haster?”

Yes. They all did.

“What’s Haster?” asked Kellie.

“No idea.”

“The colony failed within three years. As did the several attempts that preceded it. Why do you suppose that is? Why have so many efforts to move abroad been abandoned?”

There were several older children seated in the rear. One of them stood to be recognized. “It is wild country beyond the known lands,” she said. “Who would want to live there?”

“Who indeed?” echoed Macao. “And I put it to you that herein lies our fatal defect. Our common flaw. The characteristic that deters us. We love our homeland too much.”

WHEN THE LAST of the lights had gone out, and the cafés had emptied, Kellie and Digger wandered the lonely walkways that bordered the sea at the southern edge of the city. They were wet, and the Flickinger field produced by the e-suits was notoriously slippery underfoot, especially in such conditions. It didn’t seem to matter what sort of shoes he wore. He turned it off, and gasped in the sudden rush of cold salt air.

Kellie heard his reaction and guessed what he had done. She followed his lead. “It’s lovely out here,” she said.

The sea was rough. It roared against the rocks and threw spray into the air. A sailing ship, squat and heavy, lay at anchor. Lights poured out of the after cabin, and Digger could see a figure moving about inside.

“Do the Goompahs have the compass?” asked Digger.

“Don’t know.”

“Does Lookout have a magnetic north?”

“Yes, Dig. About twelve degrees off the pole. Why? Does it matter?”

“If they don’t have a compass, how will they navigate on that round-the-world jaunt they’re talking about?”

“Sun by day, stars by night. Shouldn’t be all that difficult. Except I don’t know how they’ll get past the eastern continent. They’ll have the same problem Columbus did.”

It was too dark to be able to make out where the horizon met the sky. Digger tried to visualize the sea east of Athens. He remembered a couple of big islands out there, and a few smaller chunks of land beyond. Then it was open ocean for several thousand kilometers.

He understood why the Goompahs had never crossed their oceans. How long had it taken before Leif Eriksson and the longboats made the run across the Atlantic? But it seemed odd that there’d been no serious effort to explore the continent on which they lived. It was true there were natural barriers, but they had sail, and they had easy access by water. They weren’t in the classic Greek situation of being penned in an inland sea.

They wandered out onto a wooden pier, and Kellie’s hand lay gently on his hip. It was a floating pier, and some of the planks were loose or missing. They kept going until they reached the far end, where they stood listening to the ocean. A few gulls were in the air. The universal creature. Any world that produced oceans and living things eventually produced gulls. Swamps gave you crocodiles. Forests always had wolves. Living worlds were exceedingly rare, but their creatures were remarkably alike. Which after all made sense. How many different ways are there to make a fish? The variations were almost always limited to details.

A lantern moved across the deck of the ship.

He liked this place. It felt a bit like an island lost in time. “You know, Kellie,” he said, “I wish there were a way we could talk with her.”

“With whom?”

“With Macao.”

“Forget it,” she said. “You’d scare the devil out of her.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

The oddest thing about the entire evening was the image on the map. Except that his skin color was a bit light, the guy on the winged rhino looked like my uncle Frank.

— Jenkins Log

Captain’s entry

chapter 26

Lookout.

On the ground at Saniusar.

Saturday, September 6.

MORE SURVEILLANCE DEVICES had arrived, and Kellie and Jack had spread them throughout the isthmus this time, instead of confining them to Brackel. Saniusar, the northernmost Goompah outpost, was the last of the cities to receive its allotment.

It occupied the shores of a bay and was surrounded by a ring of picturesque hills, which grew progressively higher until they ascended finally into towering mountains.

Beyond the mountains lay dense jungle, and beyond the jungle lay a broad desert, extending for thousands of kilometers, well north of the equator. Digger was beginning to understand why the Goompah world ended on the north at Saniusar.

“But they have ships,” protested Kellie. “I can understand why they haven’t crossed the seas. But running up and down the coast shouldn’t have been a problem.”

“Don’t be so sure. How far did the Greeks go?”

“But they were hemmed in. Couldn’t get beyond the Mediterranean.”

They’d been wandering the streets of Goompah cities like the wind, unseen, irrelevant. He missed Jack, and he missed being able to sit down with friends, and he missed being able to party.

He had been relatively isolated before. But it had always been in some desolate spot, remote from everything, with maybe a couple of technicians who spent all their time talking about the local grade of sandstone, or the level of humidity at a given latitude. But here, with Kellie, he was surrounded by a vibrant community whose energy crackled through the cities every day and lit up the night, and he was cut off from it all.

He touched her luminous form, her arm, her shoulder. The mild vibration projected by the external surface of the e-suit was reassuring. She moved beneath his fingers and folded herself into him. Everything was accessible through the field except her lips, which were shielded behind the hard bubble that covered her face.

They were standing outside a double-domed building on the edge of the city, looking north toward a tangle of river and valley and granite. A few of the natives were wandering about, some working, some playing with young ones, some just walking. To the west, over a few hilltops, the sea was bright and cool.

“I love you, Kellie,” he said.

Her body moved against him. She was laughing.

“What’s funny?”

“At the moment,” she said, “your choices are limited.”

“I don’t know.” He switched his e-suit off. The smell of salt air swept in. Lovely stuff. “I saw some pretty good-looking females at the park yesterday.”

The tingle blinked off with her suit. “I love you, too, Digby,” she said.

“I wish I could see you.”

“Maybe tonight, if you behave.”

He found her lips, and they stood quietly for several moments, enjoying each other. “Kellie,” he said, “I’d like very much if you would be my wife.”

She stiffened, simultaneously pulling him forward and pushing him away.

He wondered if anyone else had ever proposed to an invisible woman.

“Digger,” she said, “I’m honored.”

That didn’t sound good.

“I’m not sure it would work.”

He switched off his goggles, and the spectral form vanished. Only those dark eyes remained. “You wouldn’t have to quit,” he said. “It wouldn’t mean your career. We could work something out.”

The wind off the sea was cold. “It’s not that.”

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

Her eyes narrowed. He’d long since become accustomed to disembodied eyes, and had discovered that they did actually reflect mood and emotion. He’d always assumed that only happened in the context of a complete facial expression. “Digger, I’d like very much to marry you—”

“—But—?”

“I’m not interested in any short-term arrangement. I don’t want to commit myself to you and discover that a few years from now everything’s changed and we head our own ways.”

He pulled her back into his arms. All resistance was gone, and he was surprised to notice her cheeks were damp. “You want me to sign an agreement that I’d renew?”

She thought it over. “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t ask that. Wouldn’t do any good anyhow. I just—” She trembled. It seemed out of character. “In my family, we don’t believe in doing things halfway. You commit, or you don’t. If you commit, don’t expect that if you change your mind in five years, I’m going to shake hands and say let’s be friends.”

He was holding her tight by then. And he wanted very much to see her, but there were too many Goompahs drifting around. “It would never happen, Kellie. I love you. I want you to be my wife. Forever. No time off. No letting the lease run out.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll feel the same way when we get home?”

“Of course.” He pressed his lips against hers. “You’re a hard sell.”

“Yes I am. And if you don’t mean any of this, the price’ll be high.”

ASIDE FROM DISTRIBUTING pickups, they’d also roamed through the cities recording engraved symbols, statuary, architecture, whatever seemed of interest. They’d found a museum in Mandigol, filled with artifacts excavated from beneath existing cities. So there were Goompah archeologists.

They’d found several academies, or colleges, the most extensive of which was located in Kulnar, the home of Macao. Mirakap, an island city that was actually part of T’Mingletep, hosted concerts almost nightly. They’d recorded several, some purely instrumental, others employing singers. The Goompahs, by the way, conceded nothing to humans in the range of their voices. On the al-Jahani, Collingdale and his people seemed to have a higher estimation of native music than did Digger and Kellie.

They watched sailboat races at Hopgop, on the northeastern shore, and track events at Sakmarung. In all these places, the café was king. Everyone retired at the end of the day to the assorted bistros and taverns, and the evenings slipped away in laughter and conversation.

Life was good on the isthmus. The land was fertile, the sea full of fish, and it didn’t look as if anyone had to work very hard.

“They’ve been around as long as we have,” Digger commented on one of the reports to the al-Jahani. “But technologically, they’ve gone nowhere. Does anybody have any kind of explanation at all?”

They didn’t. There were a couple of people with Collingdale, Elizabeth Madden and Jason Holder, who thought that Goompahs simply weren’t very smart. The fact that they could use tools and build cities, they argued, didn’t mean they could manage an industrial revolution.

But if they hadn’t progressed technologically, they were doing well politically. All the cities had representative governments, although the machinery was different from place to place. Sakmarung had a single executive, chosen by a parliamentary body from among its number. He (or she) served for two local years and could not under any circumstances reassume the post. The parliamentary body was elected by a free vote of the citizenry. Collingdale thought everyone was granted the franchise, but that question was still open.

Mandigol took the classical Spartan approach: It had two executives, with equal power, who apparently kept an eye on each other. Brackel elected a parliament and an executive council, not unlike the world government at home. There was no indication of political unrest, no inclination to make war, no poverty-stricken Goompahs in the streets.

On the whole, thought Digger, they’ve done pretty well. Of course, it helps when you can pick your food off the trees on the way home.

“Maybe it’s the Toynbee idea,” said Digger.

“Who’s Toynbee?”

“Twentieth-century historian. He thought that, for a civilization to develop, the environment has to be right. It has to offer a challenge, but not so much of a challenge that it overwhelms everybody. That’s why you get progress in China and Europe but not in Micronesia or Siberia.”

But Goompahs were not humans. And who knew what rules applied? Yet the shows, the parks, the temples, the late nights on the town: The Goompahs seemed human in so many ways. They were, he thought, what we might have chosen to be, if we could.

But what was the secret?

They were capable of quarrels and scuffles. He’d seen a few. They had thieves. The locked doors at the libraries and other places that held objects of value demonstrated that. But their females thought nothing of walking the streets at night. And there were no armies.

“Their society’s not perfect,” said Kellie. “But they’re getting a lot of it right.”

“Could it be the DNA?” he asked.

“You mean a peace gene?” She shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“I mean an intelligence gene. Technology or not, I’m beginning to wonder if they’re smarter than we are.”

Two statues stood atop the twin domes. They appeared to be representations of two of the deities they’d seen at the temple in Brackel: the elderly god, the one who’d had the scroll; and the young female with the musical instrument. “Mind and passion,” suggested Kellie.

All the temples they’d seen—each city seemed to have one, and there’d been a few out in the countryside—were roofed, but were otherwise left open to the elements. It was always possible, at any time of day or night, to enter a temple.

A few visitors wandered among the columns that supported the twin domes. The gods seemed to have been assigned separate quarters there. They were seated or standing or, in a couple of cases, reclining on benches. The effect created was less distant and majestic than they’d encountered elsewhere. These were the gods at home, informal, casual, come on in and have a drink.

Along the walls, they were depicted helping children ford a river, calming a stormy sea, holding a torch high for travelers lost in a forest. That was Lykonda, her wings spread wide to keep the chill of the night from her charges. From the scrolls, they knew a little about her. She was described as the defender of the celestial realm, although they did not know why she held that exalted title. She was the guardian of knowledge, champion of the weak, protector of the traveler. Mistreat a stranger and answer to Lykonda. Elsewhere they found the laughing god, who was apparently in the middle of delivering a punch line to a group of convulsed Goompahs.

“When a god tells a joke,” whispered Kellie, “who’s not going to laugh?”

ANOTHER DEITY, WHOSE name they did not know, wielded a sword.

“Look!” Kellie stopped in front of the frieze. He wore a war helmet, held a staff with a fluttering pennant in one hand, and raised his weapon in the other. He looked enraged, with demonic creatures swarming toward him. The attackers were armed with spears and cudgels. Brute weapons.

Digger caught his breath.

The demonic creatures—

— Looked reasonably human. Like the figure on the winged rhino.

“Their noses are a little long,” said Kellie, speaking into a sudden silence.

As were their limbs. And they had claws rather than fingernails. Their hair was straggly, trailing down their backs. Their expressions breathed malevolence and treachery. They were male and female, and they very much resembled the demons one found in fifteenth-century art.

“We been here before?” asked Digger.

A group of birds scattered out of a tree, regrouped, and fluttered off to the west.

“Well,” said Kellie, “I guess we know why they went screaming into the night when you showed up.”

THE LAND BEYOND the temple rose through broken country toward the Skatbrones, the Goompah name, not for a single range, but for the vast mountainous north. A few homes dotted the lower slopes, and there were a couple of orchards. The lander had been left on a remote crag.

Kellie summoned it, and they boarded it from the temple grounds, taking a chance. But she kept the starboard side toward the sea so that no one could see the airlock open.

They climbed in and closed the hatch. Kellie took them up and headed back to the crag. Digger shut his systems down, and when they landed he happily grabbed a hot shower, changed clothes, and collapsed into his chair. After Kellie had her turn in the washroom, Bill served dinner. To her delight, Digger produced candles and a bottle of red wine from the Jenkins’s store. “Whatever made me think,” she said, “that you weren’t very romantic?”

“I majored in romance,” he said. “It’s why women have chased me so persistently all these years.”

“I understand completely. Pour the wine.”

He’d have preferred champagne, but their small store was long since gone. And he’d have liked something a bit more elegant for the occasion than meat loaf, but the lander had its limits. He filled their glasses, lit the candles, proposed a toast to his lovely fiancée. They closed the viewports so that no light would leak out, and enjoyed an evening that Digger knew he would remember forever.

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, they flew over the city.

Digger loved riding in an invisible aircraft. They kept the lights doused inside, and when he looked out, there were no stubby wings and no hull. It reminded him of his early boyhood, when he’d ridden the glide trains from Philadelphia to Wildwood, New Jersey. They’d crossed the Delaware River en route, on a bridge whose span and girders and trusses weren’t visible from inside the train. Sitting in his seat with his parents across from him, Digger (who had been Digby then, and no nonsense about it) had loved to look out at the sky and the river, and pretend the car wasn’t there, pretend he was an eagle. It had been a long time, and he hadn’t thought about those rides, those flights, for thirty years.

The city lights were dim by human standards. Oil lamps here and there. Candles. A couple of open fires. Yet they were warm and inviting, illuminating a place of magic. A place he’d want to come back to one day, when the crisis was over.

Romeo and Juliet was playing that night, would play for the next three evenings. The actual title was Baranka, and it was indeed a tale of lovers from feuding families. Baranka was the girl’s father, portrayed as an essentially decent but strong-willed character who cannot get past his own anger at his perceived enemies.

Reading it in a language he hadn’t begun to master, Digger couldn’t make a judgment as to its quality, but he was struck by the degree to which it dealt with familiar issues. When he’d mentioned it to Kellie, she’d commented that they’d been talking about a sense of humor as a universal among intelligent creatures, and she suggested the most characteristic universal could turn out to be programmed stupidity.

He wondered whether a translation might not play one day in New York and Berlin.

“How do you feel?” she asked, breaking a long silence.

“Good.” He thought she was referring to their new status.

“Really?” She seemed surprised.

“What are we talking about, Kel?”

She grinned. “How’s it feel to be the enemy of the gods?”

“Oh.” He produced an image of the frieze. The resemblance to humans was uncanny. “Not so good, actually.” He raised his voice a notch. “If you’re listening out there, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it.”

Kellie’s eyes glowed. “You think there are human-style critters around here somewhere?” she asked.

He thought about it. “Don’t know.”

“It occurs to me,” she said, “that if there are, the cloud could be a godsend for them.”

“In what way?”

“If it were to wipe out the Goompahs, it might clear the boards for the second wave.”

“The monkeys.”

“Yes. Maybe.”

“From the look of things,” he said, “I don’t think it would be an improvement.”

They landed and strolled among the crowds, and even went into a Goompah café, turned off the e-suits, and sang with the customers. It was great fun, and Digger yearned to shut down the lightbender as well and tell them he and Kellie were there and they liked a good time as much as anybody. Despite the isolation, they made it a special evening. At the end, with the omega back in the sky, and the lights going out, they returned to the lander and flew back to the crag. It overlooked the temple, a jagged piece of rock with sheer walls dropping away on all sides. And it was glorious in the light of the big moon. Farther north, the hills and ridges gave way to dark forest. The city was quiet, little more than a few smoldering lights in the night.

They got out of the lander. There was a stiff wind out of the west, and Bill was predicting rain sometime during the early-morning hours. But when you’re tucked safely inside a Flickinger field it doesn’t matter much. They were still out there when the storm came. It was an exhilarating feeling, to be caught up in the wind and the rain, with the temple below and Kellie holding tight. But when the first lightning flickered across the sky they decided the situation called for prudence. They lingered momentarily in each other’s arms, and Digger turned off her field. Before she could react she was drenched.

She pushed him away and ran for the lander.

He followed happily, using his remote to switch on the navigation lights. Her clothes had become transparent.

IT WAS STILL dark when he came fully awake. He listened and heard a distant sound. Felt it in the lander.

Voices.

Chanting.

Kellie was asleep beside him. He lifted himself carefully out of the blankets, but couldn’t see anything from inside. He pulled on his e-suit and went out into the night. It was coming from the temple grounds.

He walked to the edge of the crag and looked down. There were torches and movement. And the chant.

But it was impossible to see what was happening.

His experience with the Goompahs told him that they weren’t big early-morning risers.

He went back inside and woke Kellie.

THERE WAS A pair of Goompahs wearing black hoods and robes and carrying torches, led by another in white. It immediately felt like déjà vu, here they come again, where’s the javelin? And sure enough, there it was, hauled along by a bearer.

The crowd had grown. Someone was playing a set of pipes, and the marchers were chanting, although Digger could catch only an occasional word. “Darkness.” “Righteousness.” “Your glory.” “Help.”

Help.

Help us put a new roof on the temple?

Help us in our hour of need?

They were crowded together. Digger and Kellie kept a cautious distance.

The three robed figures moved along one of the walkways, staying in step, not military precision, but practiced nevertheless. The crowd fell in behind. He estimated it at several hundred, and they were joining in the chant and becoming more enthusiastic.

The rain had cleared off, and the stars were bright and hard.

The procession moved through a patch of woods and issued finally onto a beach. When Digger got there, well in the rear, the three leaders had thrown off their sandals and advanced a few paces into the surf. They spread out into a semicircle. The one in white looked older than the others, and he wore a wide-brimmed white hat.

“Creature of—”

The onlookers had gone quiet. They all stayed back out of the water.

“—the night—”

Digger suddenly realized he hadn’t brought a pickup. He had no way of recording this.

“—Depart—”

They got as close as they could, moving down into the wet sand, leaving footprints. But it was too dark for anyone to notice.

The marchers were looking out over the sea—

No, in fact they were looking up. At the black patch, which was sinking toward the northwestern horizon.

“—Hour of need—”

A large wave rolled in, and the one in the white robe floated over the top.

He raised his arms and the night fell silent. He stood several moments, and it seemed to Digger he was hesitating. Then he went a step or two farther out. The bearer appeared alongside him and offered the javelin. He took it and held it aloft. His lips moved. Trembled.

More Goompahs were arriving at every moment, some coming from the temple area, others arriving from the far end of the beach. But they were all silent.

He aimed the javelin in the direction of the omega, jabbed at it a few times, and handed the weapon off to one of the others. And as Digger watched in growing horror, he strode out into the waves, his robes floating, until at last he was floating. Then he was swimming, struggling to move forward against the tide. The sea tried to push him back, but he kept going and at last he got beyond the breaking waves.

He continued swimming for several minutes.

And he disappeared.

The one who had received the javelin stripped off his outer garment to reveal a white hood and robe. He raised the weapon over his head, and called out to Taris, the defender of the world.

“We beg you accept our (something). And protect us from T’Klot.” The hole. The omega. “Malio takes our plea to your divine presence. Hear him, we beg you, and extend your hand in this our time of need.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

Religion is like having children, or taking medicine, or eating, or any of a thousand other perfectly rational human activities: Taken in small doses, it has much to recommend it. One need only avoid going overboard.

— Gregory MacAllister

“Slippery Slope”

Editor-at-Large, 2227

chapter 27

On board the al-Jahani, in hyperspace.

Wednesday, September 17.

SIX MONTHS AND three days out. Collingdale had expected his people would be climbing the walls by then. But they were doing okay. It was true that some of the early enthusiasm had worn thin, but that might have been because there was less to be gleaned from the stream of data coming in from the Jenkins. By and large, they had recovered an extensive vocabulary, and they understood the syntax. From there on, mastering the language would be largely a matter of pronunciation and nuance.

Once they’d gotten on top of things, Judy had cut back on the Goompah-only requirement. They’d derived some serious benefits from the restriction, but it had lost its charm quickly and, despite the early compromises, it had begun to strain relations between the Shironi Kulp and the other passengers. In a nonstop voyage of record-breaking duration, it just wasn’t a good idea. So the linguists continued to limit themselves to Goompah in the workshop, but they had long ago become free to use whatever language they liked, with the provision that they were to regard Goompah as their native tongue, and to resort to it as the language of choice.

It had worked well.

The brief tensions that had appeared subsided, the Goompah jokes lost their edge, and Collingdale noted a decrease in the resentment that everyone on board had developed toward him and Judy.

Well. There you were. But, as he’d explained to Alex, and to several others, Judy had had a job to do, and the language policy had been the best way of getting it done.

They’d extracted a series of Goompah aphorisms from the library material, which were posted on a bulkhead in the workroom. Deal justly with your neighbor.

Assist the weak.

Be kind to all.

Everyone was invited to add to the collection, and Collingdale stopped to scribble one that he’d come across in a treatise of the teachings of Omar Koom. (That first name brought a smile. Were there also Goompahs somewhere named Frank? Or Harriet?)

The principle that he’d added to the collection: Accept no claim without evidence.

He liked that. Where’s the proof? I’m from Missouri.

How peaceful would the history of his own world have been if that idea were universally accepted? Yet these were the same creatures who exorcised demons and had allowed one of their own to walk into the sea in an effort to head off the cloud. It hadn’t taken much analysis to confirm that was what it had been about, the idiot ceremony that Digger had watched.

Well, humans weren’t very consistent either.

He stood a few moments studying the list. Enjoy your life because it is not forever. Whatever gives pleasure without injuring another is to be sought, but let no pleasure become so ingrained that it overcomes reason. Beware addictions; the essence of the good life is a free exercise of the will, directed by reason.

Beware addictions.

Judy was talking about eventual publication. Goompah Wit and Wisdom. Might be a best-seller one day.

He admired their utilitarian approach to life. Beauty equated to a kind of simplicity. Suiting the form to the purpose. No frills. They’d never have approved of Renaissance cathedrals or Main Line mansions. Keep a clear eye on what is important and do not get caught up in the frivolous.

It was, he thought, mundane stuff. But it had a ringing clarity and lacked the Puritanical sense of guilt that this sort of code would have had back home. If you get something wrong, fix it and move on. Do not weep for that which is beyond your control.

Accept responsibility. Bring no one into the world whom you are not prepared to love and nourish.

He wondered how a society that seemed to put no limits on sex managed that?

ONE OF THE linguists had become romantically involved with Ed Paxton, a mathematician, and the captain had performed the wedding. Collingdale had always found mathematicians dull, methodical, and unimaginative. Why anybody would marry one, he could not understand. He’d wondered why evolutionary forces hadn’t wiped the breed out.

Paxton had seemed typical of the tribe, but he had conquered the heart of Marilyn McGee, an attractive blonde who had shown a penchant for winning the shipwide chess tournaments.

Another wedding was in the works, this time between two of the linguists. There was talk of doing a Goompah ceremony. Digger had captured a couple of isthmus weddings for the record, so they had models. And Judy was already designing a costume for the captain. Everybody involved would need an appropriately styled hat, and the only projected change would be a substitution of the Judeo/Christian God for Taris, Zonia, and Holen.

They’d also done a few Goompah sing-alongs. Those had become popular with everyone. And they’d staged two native dramas.

Judy had collected eight Goompah dramas from the scrolls, and two more that Digger had recorded. Two were tragedies in the classic sense; the others were like something out of the Baines Brothers, with lots of slapstick, characters running into walls, getting caught en flagrante, and constantly falling down.

The shows frequently involved the audience. In one, a staged brawl spilled over into the front rows, where the patrons got caught up in the battle. Characters chased each other through the aisles. One comedy was apparently interrupted midway when bandits, fleeing from authorities, raced down a center aisle with bags of coins. One of the bandits tossed his loot to a patron, who was then set on and dragged off by the authorities. The audience loved it, and the human observers needed time to recognize that it was all rehearsed.

Another show stationed a medical unit at the rear of the theater. Periodically, when someone fell down onstage, or walked into a chair, the actors called out “Gwalla timbo,” which translated roughly to medical team. The gwalla timbo would then gallop forward, bearing stretchers and splints, collect the injured party, plunk him unceremoniously onto the stretcher, and charge back out, usually dropping the patient en route. It was hilarious.

He would have liked to spend an evening in a Goompah theater with Mary.

THEY ALSO WATCHED three funerals. The dead were wrapped in sheets and interred in the ground in the presence of family and friends. The mourners did not give in to weeping or other signs of hysteria, although several had to be helped away, and two collapsed altogether.

Collingdale and the linguists listened closely to the ceremonies. The blessings of the gods were invoked in two, and religious references did not show up at all in the third. There was no talk at any of them of a hereafter or suggestions that the deceased had gone to a better world, leading the humans to suspect that the Goompahs did not believe in an afterlife. He suggested to Judy that she advise her people not to mention the fact in personal messages home. “No point stirring up the missionary society,” he said.

They also were able to interpret the signs that Jack and Digger had seen on the schoolroom wall on their first visit. It had been somewhat difficult because the characters were stylized. But they read THINK FOR YOURSELF and SHOW ME THE EVIDENCE.

They had a record of one class in which the students were learning basic arithmetic. They were operating off a base twelve. Which meant that 14 + 15 = 29, but there are actually 33 items in the result. Ed explained it to him, but it gave Collingdale a headache, and he simply nodded yes when asked if he understood. It didn’t really matter anyhow.

He was impressed by the fact that widespread literacy seemed to exist. That was no small accomplishment when one considered the paucity of reading materials.

There was a priest class, whose actions Digger had recorded on several occasions.

Think for yourself.

There was no visual record of the sacrifice made at Saniusar. Digger had said there were several hundred locals in attendance. Pretty sparse crowd when you think of it, in a town with a population they’d estimated at around thirty thousand.

That was 1 percent for a service intended to invoke salvation for the city. “It tells me,” Frank Bergen said, “that these critters don’t take their religious obligations very seriously.”

THE ONE ASPECT of life on Lookout that Collingdale found unsettling was the open sexuality. That struck him as stranger even than the cleric who had gone into the ocean. Scheduled orgies could be found most nights in most cities. With signs inviting participants to pop by. The Goompahs no longer looked like the happy innocents of the early days.

Hutch had also been surprised and had told him she would have liked to bury it for the time being, but the news had already gotten out. A number of politicians and religious leaders had expressed their shock. If you could do orgies at city hall, what kind of society were you running? No wonder they didn’t have time to conduct wars.

The general public, Hutch thought, seemed to be taking it in stride.

He was still in the workroom looking at the Goompah aphorisms when Bill broke in. “Incoming for you, David,” he said. “From the Hawksbill.”

Julie Carson was about an hour and a half away via hyperlight transmission.

One of the screens lit up with the Hawksbill seal, then Julie appeared. “Dave,” she said, “I wanted to say thanks for the material on the Goompahs. We’re getting an education. Whit, by the way, is trying to learn the language, but I don’t think he’s having much luck.”

Collingdale felt a sudden bump and heard the steady thrum of power in the bulkhead change tones. It grew louder. And became erratic.

“He thinks they’re more advanced than we are.” Julie smiled. At least he thought she had. Her image disintegrated, came back, and began to roll over. “He says they’re less violent and less hung up about sex. I’ve watched them pop one another in the street, and they don’t seem less violent to me. They just look funnier when they fall down.”

The screen went blank. The captain’s voice broke in: “ Everybody please get to a harness. We’ll be making a jump in less than one minute. I say again. ”

Collingdale’s heart sank. They were still ten weeks from Lookout.

ARCHIVE

We now know that the creatures the media have been so blithely referring to as Goompahs, with all the innocence and unsophistication that term implies, in fact worship pagan gods, practice an equivalent of human sacrifice, and engage in unrestrained sex. Margaret, this is shocking behavior, utterly beyond belief. It demonstrates the absolute depravity of the Nonintervention Protocol. Do these unfortunate creatures possess souls? Of course they do, or they wouldn’t be seeking their Creator. But they’re being misled, and they need to be shown the truth. I urge everyone who’s out there watching today to get in touch with their congressman, to write to the Council, to demand that the Protocol be declared null and void.

When you think about it, Margaret, it’s already too late for a lot of them. A disaster of major proportions is about to overtake them, and large numbers of them are going to their judgment utterly unprepared. We have an obligation to act, and it seems to me if we fail to do so, we will share their guilt.

— Rev. George Christopher

The Tabernacle Hour

chapter 28

On board the al-Jahani.

Wednesday, September 17.

THEY WERE OUT under the stars again.

“No chance?” he asked Alexandra, pleading with her, demanding that she come up with something.

“I’m sorry, David,” she said. “It’s kaput.”

They were moving at 20,000 kph. Crawling. “How about if we just try it? Just make the jump back? See what happens.”

Alexandra was about average size, came up maybe to Collingdale’s shoulder. She lacked the presence of some of the other female captains he’d known, did not have the knack of putting iron into her voice when she needed to, did not have Priscilla Hutchins’s blue gaze that warned you to back off. Nevertheless she said no, and he understood that she would not risk the ship.

She was blond, with good features, not beautiful, but the kind of woman you knew you could trust if you were in trouble. Under normal circumstances she was congenial, easygoing, flexible. “Overriding,” she said, “would pose a severe risk to the ship and the passengers, and we will not do it.”

There wasn’t much jiggle room that he could see. He argued for a couple of minutes before reluctantly conceding. “I’d better let Julie know.”

“I’ve already sent a message to the Hawksbill. They should be getting it in about”—she checked the time—“an hour.”

“How about Hutch?”

“I thought you’d want to do that.”

Yes. The crash-and-burn transmission.

First he needed to inform the passengers. He did it from the bridge, telling them what they’d undoubtedly already guessed, that they were stranded, that help would be coming, but that all possibility of moving on to Lookout was gone. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We took our chances, and it looks as if we lost.” He paused and shrugged helplessly. “I’m not sure yet how long we’ll be here. Broadside has been notified. They’ll send over a relief mission, but the captain tells me it’s going to take a few weeks to get to us, at best. So everybody make themselves comfortable.

“I should add, by the way, that there’s no danger.”

He sent the bad news to Hutch from his quarters, keeping it short, nothing but the facts. Engine burnout. Going nowhere. We’ve let Broadside know. Everybody’s safe. We have plenty of air and food. He tried to sound upbeat, knowing the news would hit her hard. There was nothing she could do, of course. She was too far. There’d be no rabbits out of the hat this time, like the ones at Deepsix and on the chindi.

The next message went to the Jenkins. “Digger, we won’t be coming. Jump engines blown. I’m going to try to arrange transportation for myself on the Hawksbill. But you better assume everything’s up to you. You need to figure out a way to get the Goompahs to evacuate the cities prior to the hit.”

Then he considered what he wanted to tell Julie. He started by calling Alexandra, who was back on the bridge. “If we ask them to come here, to us, do they lose enough time that we endanger their mission?”

Alex looked tired. “Hard to say, Dave. If they get lucky and find us right away, it shouldn’t be a problem. But the jumps are imprecise. You know that as well as I do. And especially under these conditions.”

“What conditions do you mean?”

“They’re already in hyperspace. They’re going to have to jump out, figure out where they are, set a new course, and come get us.”

Damn. He looked out his portal at the stars. He could see the Tyrolean Cloud that, according to Melinda Park, was a hundred light-years across, filled with burning gas and young stars. At their present speed, the al-Jahani would need five million years just to go from one end of the cloud to the other. “Thanks, Alex,” he said.

He switched over to the AI. “Bill, message for the Hawksbill.”

“Ready to record, David.”

The Hawksbill was a cargo hauler with a total passenger capacity of two. They already had two. They’d need Marge, so Whitlock would have to come aboard the al-Jahani, trade places with Collingdale.

How the hell could he say that? Julie, it looks as if the al-Jahani is out of action. I need you to pick me up. I know there’s a space problem, but we don’t really need the poet.

No, best not insult Whitlock. Julie seemed to like him.

He wrote his ideas down, made a few adjustments, activated the system, and read it to her, trying to look spontaneous. Then he told Bill to send it.

Next he tracked down Judy. “Let’s get everybody together,” he said. “We need to talk.”

The mood on the ship was bleak. The frustration was fed not only by the perceived importance of the mission, but by the depth of individual commitment. These were people who’d invested a year and a half of their lives. His group of linguists, his Goompahs, had spent seven months working to acquire the language, had done so, had actually believed they were going to go into the Intigo and rescue tens of thousands of the natives. The others, the senior personnel, the Upper Strata, were watching an unparalleled opportunity, a chance to observe a functioning alien civilization, go south.

“What are you going to tell them?”

Before he could answer, his link vibrated against his wrist. “Collingdale,” he said.

“Dave.” Alexandra’s voice. “I’ve got a delegation of your people up here.”

He looked at Judy. “You know about this?”

She shook her head. “No.”

The bridge was off-limits except to a few specified persons, or by invitation. It was supposed to be the one place in the ship to which the captain could retreat from social obligations. When Collingdale and Judy got there, all eleven of their linguists were either crowded inside or standing around the open door.

Harry Chin tried to take Judy aside.

“After we clear the bridge,” she snapped.

But Harry showed no inclination to be put off. “Listen, we’ve got too much invested in this to just sit here.”

Collingdale had never been a good disciplinarian. In fact he had relatively little experience with difficult cases. The people he’d led on past missions had always been mature professionals. Tell them what you needed and they produced. They might question authority on occasion, but the tone was subtle. This felt like mutiny.

But Judy never hesitated. “Listen,” she said, raising her voice so they could all hear. “The decision’s been made. Everyone go back to the workroom. We’ll talk there.”

Mike Metzger had been standing beside Harry, lending support. He was tall and reedy, usually the epitome of courtesy. A muscle in his neck was twitching, and his expression was a mixture of anger, regret, nervousness. He turned and looked at David. “Can’t you do something?” he asked.

It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about remaining stalled in the middle of nowhere, or returning to the workroom. But he was close to tears.

Terry MacAndrew put an arm around his shoulders to calm him. “Judy,” Terry said, lapsing into the Scottish burr that David had only heard previously when Terry drank too much, “we’ve talked it over. We’re all willing to take the chance. And we know you are.”

“You’ve all agreed to this.”

“Right. We say we should move ahead. Take our chances.”

“Really.”

“The stakes are too high just to sit here.”

“ ‘The stakes are too high’? You’ve been reading too many novels.”

Terry glanced back at Alex, who was out of her seat, standing by one of the navigation panels, looking bored and annoyed. “We’re too close to quit now. Bill thinks we’d be okay if we tried it.” He turned toward Alex. “Isn’t that right, Captain?”

She dismissed him and spoke to Collingdale. “As I told you earlier, David, if we go back in and the system breaks down, which it is threatening to do, we’ll stay in there.” She looked around at the others. “Permanently. That’s not going to happen to my ship. Or to my passengers. Bill has nothing to say about it.” Her eyes came back to Collingdale. “Please get your people off my bridge.”

THE REPLY FROM the Hawksbill arrived shortly after midnight. Julie’s message was simple and direct: “On our way. We can make room for one more.”

ARCHIVE

Alex, sorry to hear about the problem. I’m sending the Vignon. They’ll do a temporary fix to get you running again. But everybody, including you, will be evacuated to the Vignon before attempting transit. Let Bill bring it in.

Good luck. Frank.

— Broadside transmission

September 18