Priam's Lens

TWENTY-TWO Something of Value

The shuttle craft circled the area and studied the settlement below. It was quite typical of small communities on Eden, although those on the other continent had not developed as smoothly, and those who lived there were still primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Not that Eden’s small villages were any wonders of technology, but the people did tend to stay put and trade a bit with their near neighbors.

Like the others they had surveyed, this one had shelters but no totally enclosed structures; rather, the “houses” were basically earthworks with roofs of woven straw held up by bamboolike poles. They had no sides, and were open to the elements.

There was a small fire pit, but it was well away from the rest of the village and only a wisp of smoke could be seen from it. These people had an inordinate fear of fire, and while they used it, particularly on Eden, they used it minimally.

At one time there appeared to have been taller earthworks as a kind of outer wall, but these had now been so dug through with access paths that they were more a boundary than a hindrance.

As with the others, the people painted their faces and bodies, sometimes with dyes but sometimes with permanent and elaborate tattoos. They wore no clothing. The women had long hair but the length did vary once it reached the shoulders; the men tended to wear shoulder-length hair and medium-full beards, but clearly hair and beards were cut and trimmed.

The newcomers had already seen how some great sea beasts could sneak in under the sand and present a nasty danger to anyone on it, yet these people seemed to have no fear of them. There weren’t too many coastal communities, but the few that there were seemed to have found a way to divert the creatures or keep them well at bay. Indeed, the coastal types were mostly fishers, who used small, rough dugout canoes to spread nets woven of hairy vines native to the more junglelike interior. They used the sea creatures—“fish” was a relative term for creatures that filled the same general niche and were edible—as trade goods for dyes, fruits, vegetables, cooking oils, and the like from villages farther inland.

The cliffs seemed to be almost solid salt.

So far they had contacted a number of tribal groups on Eden—and particularly in the Great Basin region, the vast bowl-shaped area ringed by high mountains—looking for any traces of the expedition that had been sent in and had performed its duty.

The two-person shuttle craft did one more lazy circle, then the uniformed woman in the left seat said to her similarly attired male companion, “Let’s put down. This is the most sophisticated-looking group we’ve seen on the coast yet, and the closest to the site of old Ephesus.”

“You’re the boss,” the man responded, and hordes of young children scattered and people came from just about everywhere pointing to the sky as they descended.

“Jeez, they really make a lot of babies around here,” the woman noted.

Her companion shrugged. “After dark there doesn’t seem an awful lot else to do.”

The shuttle gave a thump and was then on the ground. The hatch opened, and a set of steps came out, leading to the ground on the side away from the village wall.

They expected to see everybody start running or hiding behind the battlements. Instead people, particularly the kids, rushed to them with laughing, smiling faces.

Amid childish greetings that amounted mostly to “Hello, lady! Hello, man!” there were a few older faces, mostly women but at least one man who, even through the beard, had a somewhat familiar look to the uniformed woman.

He made his way through the kids, who had to be dissuaded from climbing into the shuttle by automatically closing the hatch from the outside, and he finally got to the two of them.

“Hello,” he greeted them. It was an oddly accented voice, but firm and deep and clear. “They said you would come one day, but most of us no longer believed it.”

She stared hard at him. “Mister Harker? That can’t be you behind that beard, can it?” She knew it couldn’t be—he was too young for that—but he sure looked a lot like the warrant officer.

The young man laughed. “I think you want my grandfather. I’m afraid he’s not here right now, but my grandmother is overseeing the salting of the morning catch. Would you like me to take you to her?”

“Your grand—” She caught herself. “Yes, please. We would like to meet her.”

“We don’t use long names around here,” the young man explained. “It’s not worth it. And, as I understand it, they never could decide on what family name to use, so they finally just said to heck with it and haven’t used much since. Instead, when they founded this village they named it Treasure. That’s all we’ve called ourselves since I was born. The Treasure People. I’m Curly, ’cause of my curly hair. ’Course, half the people here got curly hair, but I got the name first.”

“Well, I’m Barbara, and this is Assad. We’ll keep it on a first-name basis, then,” the woman said.

A lot of the villagers looked very, very related; the new arrivals had to wonder just how close some of them were. Still, there was some variety, and it was clear that they had sprung from more than two people.

An older man, with deep, ancient scars carved in his skin and a body covered with faded tattoos, his hair and beard gray, but who looked of more Mediterranean ancestry than Curly did, got to his feet with the aid of a carved walking stick and came toward them. He limped from what was clearly a very old wound, but he seemed not to notice.

“Hello!” he called to them. “I am so happy to see that you arrived before I was gone to God.”

“We seem to have been expected,” Assad commented, smiling and relaxed. “Are you from the original expedition?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he replied. “But I was born and raised here, before the Liberation. I was simply lucky enough to be there and be a part of it. I should have died, but God decided at the last minute that somebody had to tell the story of those who were there at the end. I’ve waited many years to tell it to somebody.”

“We will certainly listen,” Barbara assured him, “and people who’ll follow us will interview everybody and record it for future generations. You know what I mean by that?”

“I have been told that the voice and even the image can be somehow captured and shown elsewhere, yes, but I never saw it and I got to admit it’s a little wild to think on.”

“Uncle, these people want to see Grandmother,” Curly put in.

“Huh? Oh, all right, sure. Let’s all go over. She’s right over there.”

They headed toward an older woman who was still in excellent physical shape but who clearly had lived long and been through a lot. Her hair was almost white, and her skin was weathered and wrinkled, but there was a tightness to the form and she still was a handsome woman. She was giving instructions, mostly critiques, to younger women packing fish in salt loaves, when she heard them and turned.

“Hey, Kat! I thought you’d be running for the air boat!” the gray-haired man called.

She turned and smiled. “Littlefeet, one of these days you’re going to grow up! I knew they’d come in their own time.”

The two officers stared. Finally, Assad said, “You are not Katarina Socolov, are you?”

The old woman smiled. She didn’t have all her teeth anymore, but she had more than many her age. “Yes, although it’s been a very long time since anybody called me anything more than `Kat,’ or more often Mom or Grandma.”

“But—we’ve been searching all over for you and the others! There are stories about you around the region, but we thought we’d never find you!”

“Well, we’ve been right here since six months or so after the big bang. Couldn’t do much more. By then I was pregnant with this hairy bastard’s father,” she gestured toward Curly, “and I was scared to death as it was. Never thought I’d ever have a kid at all. We set up right here, the four of us, after Littlefeet reached us at the Styx.”

“Four? There are other survivors?” Assad pressed.

“Well, not really. Depends on how you look at it, I guess. There’s Gene, of course—he’s Curly’s grandfather, as well as a lot of others you see around here—and Father Chicanis was around for some time, but he died a year or two ago. Spent half his life trying to reestablish the true faith on Eden, only to fail miserably not only at that but even at keeping it up himself. See, those Titans, they were using everybody as guinea pigs. Mostly it was keeping everybody out in the wild, well, wild. Raw material for their experiments, we figure. They used a broadcast net and some biochemical agents to do the job in a general sense. Worked on us as much as it had on the ones born and raised here. Still around, so maybe it’s inside the genes now or something. Weird stuff, too. Like extreme claustrophobia. No buildings, you see? We built a nice big straw and bamboo hut—we call ’em straw and bamboo, even though they aren’t really—using designs I remembered from my anthropology studies. Real pretty thing, and sturdy. But we couldn’t spend the night in it. In fact, we couldn’t spend ten minutes in it before we were all climbing the walls and rushing outside. That kind of stuff. It actually gets worse as you get older, too. I don’t think we could ever go down that tunnel now, and even that big factory is the stuff of nightmares. I don’t know how Littlefeet and Spotty did it. More force of will than me, anyway.”

“Is that why you never went back to your shuttle?” Barbara asked her.

“Oh, we did. Not right away, of course, but a couple of years later, when we managed to get real beach access and test the dugout canoes. Thing was, we couldn’t get in the damned thing. That claustrophobia again, you see. And then we got to thinking, that even if we forced ourselves in, even if we took some of the organic drugs and maybe knocked ourselves out for the trip, where would we wind up? In a little room on the little moon, and then to a little enclosed shuttle, and—well, you see? We couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. By then—two, three years—we had a couple of kids. Couldn’t leave ’em, and we couldn’t really take them into that environment when we weren’t sure we wouldn’t go crazy. That kind of settled it.”

They nodded. It was consistent with the behavior several of the survey teams had monitored, and now, coming from someone familiar with the outside universe, it made sense.

“So you stayed and you built all this,” Barbara said, looking around.

“Yeah, eventually we solved the serious problems. It rains a lot in this place, so we dug out those big cisterns and lined them with a clay that proved pretty waterproof and we’ve never been without fresh water. About five years ago we found a kind of forest stalk that’s pretty big but hollow inside, and, sealed with clay, it actually works well as a pipe. Now we got running water and a basic system for getting rid of waste. A lot of the kids are pretty clever, too. They’ve been coming up with stuff. We’re actually building a new kind of society here. It’s different, it’s not evolving anything like what I grew up with, but it’s a good society. You know we’ve never had a murder here? There’s virtually no crime at all. The Hunters, poor devils, have been pretty well wiped out. When we run across a possible survivor or the result of some other sick Titan experiment, we put them out of their misery. Otherwise, there’s little in the way of violence. You feel safe and secure here. There’s plenty of food, the climate’s good, and these kids have never really known want or fear. If somebody, even a stranger, comes, they’re welcome, as you are, to anything we might have and free to help out or go along.”

“Any regrets?”

“Oh, a few. I spent some time feeling really miserably sorry for myself, until I suddenly realized that I was crying over missing very superficial things when I had what was really important right here. Good kids, good friends, and a lifetime to study and see how a new society develops. One of these days, maybe, I’ll record it all. If not, somebody else will come, maybe from my old school, and critique us. My old mentor led off a lecture, once, on primitive cultures and societies by cautioning against prejudgment. He said that we measure our progress by the wrong things, by whoever has the most things at the end of life. That people spend their lives, whether part of an interstellar civilization or hunting wild boar in the rainforests with a spear, searching for something of value. That something is different for almost every individual, and impossible to define, but you know it when you see it, you know it when you have it, and you know it if you’ve lost it. Most people at the end of their lives never do have it. Now look around. This is mine.”

They let that stand, unable to think of anything to say in reply. Finally, Barbara asked, “Where is Mister Harker? You said he was the other survivor.”

“Gene? Oh, yes. In one way he agrees with me on this, but for many, many years he was still missing something, and he had this maniacal drive to have it no matter how long it took and no matter how many tools he had to reinvent. Well, he’s had it now for a while, and there’s few days when he doesn’t revel in it. I like it now and then, but it’s not really a part of my satisfaction in life.”

“And it is…?”

She pointed out to the sea. “There he is now! You can see him just on his way in from the islands!”

They both turned, and gasped almost in unison. Still a way out, but heading in, was a sleek and sexy sailboat. A distant figure on board was just trimming the sails to let the tide carry him in the rest of the way.

“He built that? With what you have here?” Assad was almost speechless.

“Indeed he did. He and a lot of the others here, anyway. He did it without computers, without blueprints, although he did use designs he baked in clay, and had to fashion and perfect out of stone and salvaged bits of metal and whatever all the tools required. He also had to wait until enough kids were old enough to help him build it, too!

Now he’s out there half the time with two or three grand-kids. He’s too old to do it, but he swears he’s going to sail it all the way to the other continent someday. I told him I knocked him cold once for turning into an idiot and I can damn well do it again!”

Barbara looked at the beach below. “I thought there were some kind of sea monsters that burrow under the sands,” she noted. “Why don’t they pose a danger to your men and boats?”

Kat laughed. “Oh, when I first came ashore I panicked at those things! I got hysterical with fear! But when you find out how to detect them before they detect you, and you have good enough spears and maybe mallets to drive them in, you wind up getting them before they get you. You know—they taste pretty damned good, if you’re willing to spend enough time with enough people digging ’em out. We don’t see many of ’em anymore. We think maybe either they know better than to come up here or maybe we’ve eaten the whole damned local population.”

“Then—it’s safe to go down there and meet him?”

“Oh, sure. Take a couple of the boys with you just in case, but you won’t have problems.”

It was a long walk along the cliffs until they came to a place where the land dipped. Into that spot somebody, maybe the four from the original expedition, had carved well-worn steps that switched back all the way down to the beach.

“We have to carve a new set every year or two. They wear away, even if you coat ’em with clay,” Curly told them. “It’s no big deal. It’s soft, mostly salt, and if it gets too dangerous it’s not that far until there’s another dip almost down to beach level.”

They needn’t have worried about going down to a potentially dangerous beach alone. It seemed like half the kids followed them, mostly gawking, and a lot of the older ones as well.

More than once they were asked why they had sails on their bodies, and they realized that these people had never even seen folks wearing clothes. The best they could manage was, “Well, not all the places are as nice as this, and in many you need protection or you will get hurt.”

They waited a bit for Gene Harker to come in. He came in fairly fast, with all sails struck, and rode the sailboat right up onto the beach. Children rushed to take thick ropes and drag it out of the water. Then the young kids who were the passengers jumped out first, and, finally, the old man.

Gene Harker also looked very good for his age, but he was white-bearded, and what hair still on his head was snow white as well. Still, he had those same unusual blue eyes that had always made him stand out to the ladies.

He did one last check and then jumped down to the sand with an “Oomph!” He straightened up, and only then saw the two uniformed people waiting for him. He stopped a moment, squinted, then walked forward and stared right at Barbara.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Is that you, Fenitucci?”

And, to the very last one, all the others on the beach suddenly shut up, turned, and said, as one, “That’s Bambi the Destroyer?”

She turned purple at that, but could only manage, “Oh, my God!”

“But she’s so young,” Kat noted when informed of who one of their visitors was.

“I think it’s been a lot longer for us here on Helena than it was for them up there,” Gene responded. He looked at the Marine. “Jeez, Fenitucci! Not enough time to age one whit but enough time to somehow pick up a direct commission? You’re a lieutenant now?”

She nodded. “For service above and beyond. You’d be an admiral if you’d have made it back.”

“So what the hell did you do other than be a pain in my butt for a time?”

She grinned. “You aren’t the only one who can ride the keel,” she noted. “Commander Park got the idea. You were on one side of the Odysseus, and they knew it, and I was on the other side and they didn’t because they only picked up your signal and figured that every time they spotted me I was a ghost echo of your suit.”

“Huh? You mean you were along all the time?”

“Sure. Only while you went inside and joined the club, I stayed outside, nice and sedated, until we rendezvoused with the Dutchman. Then I detached and went over to his ship. He never suspected a thing. The moment your little party took off, the Hucamarea came through the gate. He tried to activate weapons and blow the joint, but I’d had a full week to play with and interface with his systems. It was a souped-up ship, but it was still a damned tug, Orion class, a real antique. I had no problems accessing and reprogramming some key areas. The only thing I didn’t figure on was how nutty he really was. I barely got off that tub before he blew it and himself and whatever crew he had to kingdom come.”

Harker sighed. “So you still don’t know who he was?”

“Oh, we know. I had that from his data banks early on. His name—his real name—was Akim Tamsheh. He was about as Dutch as Colonel N’Gana. But he had a lot in common with the old Dutchman of legend, and he apparently knew the legend from the old opera, or so the old lady told us later. In the early days of the Titan invasion, it seemed he was a tug captain on some backwater planet and then the white ships started showing up. He panicked, cut and ran, and disappeared. That was why we couldn’t trace him. All his records were lost as well in that early takeover. Seems he left his wife and two kids on that world when he chickened out. You can guess the rest.”

Harker sighed. “I think I see. What a shame. Still, without his pirate crew of gutsy looters like Jastrow, we wouldn’t have been able to free this world. I guess that brings up the big question. We’ve been here a long time. I don’t know how long—we don’t have seasons to speak of, and there’s no particular reason or means of keeping time here except your basic rock sundial like that one we made over there. So I don’t know how long it’s been. A long time.”

“Three years, four months for me, a tad over twenty-seven years for the two of you,” she told him. “We’ve had a lot of cleanup to do, and a lot of scouting. We’re still in the risky business of going behind Titan lines and laying more targeting genholes. It’ll probably take until I’m older than you are before it’s finished. It’s not without cost, either. Word of what we’re doing hasn’t outpaced us yet, but it does appear that they’re catching on. It’s not like we can put the Priam bolts on ships like laser cannon. Turns out they aren’t bolts of energy at all, they’re cracks in the universe! Even so, building more control rooms and intercepting more exchanges from that thing, whatever and wherever it is out there, is giving us an edge. We’ve failed on a few other worlds, and we’ve—well, some worlds weren’t as well targeted. It’s going to be long and nasty, and the weapon, in the end, won’t be decisive. What it did do was give us back Helena and a dozen other worlds so far, each one of which they developed differently, it seems, except for the flowers that we still haven’t figured out yet. You kill that energy net they set up, the flowers die. Not much left to study.”

“I know. So they may yet come back?”

“They could. We’re gonna try like hell not to let ’em. Besides, now that we have something that does work, we have leads on other things that maybe aren’t so draconian. The thing is, I’m not sure we’re ever going to be able to contact them, speak to them, figure out what the hell they really think they’re doing. Even if we’re not winning, we’ve stopped losing. That’s thanks to you, Harker. You and Kat, here, and the others.”

Kat cleared her throat nervously, “Lieutenant—the main thing is, we don’t want us, or our children and grand-children, to be some kind of specimens here. Social research and bringing the surviving primitives back into the bosom of civilization. This is our world now. We have a right to develop it our way. Otherwise we’ll go right back to doing to ourselves and others just what the Titans were doing to us. Some things we could use. Some versions of modem medicine. Some ways to restore some of the cultural heritage, at least in stories, songs, and legends. That kind of thing. But colonial administrators, social scientists, geneticists, and, God save us, missionaries—no.”

Fenitucci sighed. “We’ll do what we can. At least this world was a private holding. The Karas, Melcouri, and Sotoropolis families still have power and position, and can exercise a claim. If they can keep it out, they will.”

“You must also carry back to the people of Colonel N’Gana, Sergeant Mogutu, and even poor Hamille the story of their bravery and dedication,” Kat told her. “Many soldiers die obscure and meaningless deaths, I know, but they did not. They died for something, and they succeeded in what they set out to do. They gave their lives so we could, well, not lose. They deserve to be recognized for that.”

“We’ll take the oral histories down,” Fenitucci promised them. “And we’ll carry your own wishes to the First Families of Helena. That’s all I can promise.” She looked over at Curly, lounging nearby, and at several of the other young men with rippling muscles and substantial proportions in other areas. “Hell, I might even drop back for a bit when I get some time off,” she told them. “Be kind of interesting to go native for a few weeks here. There are some real possibilities. Besides, it seems, thanks to you, that my reputation’s already preceded me anyway.”

Harker looked sheepish. “Hey, there are only so many stories I could tell…”

As the shadows grew long and the sun began to touch the distant mountains, the two marines headed back to their shuttle, got in, and prepared to depart. They had reports to file, contacts to make, and, as military personnel, perhaps battles left to fight.

As they lifted off, they circled the small coastal village one last time.

“Treasure,” Barbara Fenitucci muttered.

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing. I was just looking at folks one step from the cavemen who live in the open and age at twice the going rate and even though it’s not my idea of how to do it, I can’t shake the idea that I’ve just spoken with some of the richest human beings left around. What do you think, Assad?”

The sergeant shrugged. “I think I want a gourmet meal, the finest wines, in climate-controlled splendor. And for now I’d settle for a soak in a spa bath.”

Fenitucci laughed. “God!” she wondered. “I wonder what my legend’s gonna be like with those people in another fifty years.”

“You think they’ll let them alone?”

“For a while,” she replied. “But, eventually, it’ll be irresistible to the powers that be to meddle. We never learn, we humans. That’s why God sends plagues, pestilence, and occasional Titan invaders to kick our asses and make us think for a while. But we forget. We always forget. Maybe it’s the way things work in the universe?”

“Huh? What do you mean, Lieutenant?”

“Maybe the Titans aren’t so hard to figure out after all. Maybe individuals live to find something of value, but maybe, just maybe, the way the universe works is that the race that dies out last, and with the most worlds, wins.”