Spinneret

Chapter 20

The first napkin had been easy, but for some reason Carmen had to fold the second one four times before she finally got it right. Setting it down in the center of the plate, she stepped back to survey the result. Terrible, she decided, the perfectionist within her choosing that moment to surface and be offended.

Starburst napkin designs on Army-issue plates. Miss America at the shipyards.

Oh, well. Peter probably won't even notice.

That last, at least, was almost certainly true. Not that Hafner was uncultured; she would hardly enjoy having him around if he were. But the past weeks had been hectic ones for him, and the last four days had topped even that. It'd only been with great difficulty that she'd been able to draw him back to Unie long enough for this dinner.

Which brought up another issue entirely. She'd known Hafner for almost four months now, and while she appreciated him as a friend she had no feelings toward him that could remotely be considered romantic. So why had she missed his company so much while he was out poking around the Dead Sea? For that matter, why had she knocked herself out to make this evening something special? Maybe I've simply forgotten what it's like to have a really good friend, she thought—which was a rather depressing thought all by itself. No doubt about it; I've got to settle down somewhere one of these days.

There was a tap on the door, and she glanced at her watch with mild surprise.

Hafner was seldom very late for appointments, but he usually wasn't this early, either. But no matter; things were adequately ready. Smiling, she opened the door.

"Hello, Carmen. May I come in?"

Her smile winked out. "Cris," she said, with a cold formality she hoped covered up her surprise. "As a matter of fact, I'm expecting someone else at the moment.

So if you'll just—"

"Ah—Dr. Hafner, I presume," Perez nodded. "Don't worry, this will take only a minute." He moved forward … and somehow he was past her, strolling by the table settings with an appreciative nod.

Gritting her teeth, Carmen closed the door and stalked after him. "Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not on twenty-seven-hour duty here," she said icily. "So if you'd kindly restrict your calls to business hours—"

"Somewhere in the computer library is a copy of the Scientific Directory," he interrupted, turning to face her. "For reasons I won't go into it's been classified and hidden behind some security password. I'd like you to get me access to it."

Carmen took a deep breath. "In the first place, I'm not about to give you classified material without specific orders to the contrary. In the second place, you have an incredible gall to burst in on me without any better reason than that. I could have told you no over the phone."

He waited her out, and then lifted a finger. "In the first place, as you put it, there's absolutely nothing remotely classifiable in the Directory. Not only is it in half the libraries in North America and Europe, but I know for a fact it was accessible here a month ago. And in the second place—" He hesitated. "I don't want Meredith to know I talked to you."

She arched her eyebrows. "My, we are getting paranoid, aren't we? What makes you think the colonel would want to record your calls, let alone is actually doing so?"

He smiled tightly. "Come on, Carmen, you know better than that. I'm the thorn in Meredith's flesh, the major obstacle to his dream of making Astra America's fiftysecond state. He's going to suggest to the Astran scientists that a number of American experts be invited to help us decipher the Spinneret controls, and the only reason he's hidden the Directory is to keep me from counterproposing a more international group."

She thought about that for a moment. Perez was probably the last person in the world she was interested in doing favors for— he'd proved time and again to be a master pain to everyone around him. And yet … it did make sense to get the best people possible. The sooner they learned how to operate the Spinneret the better; and given the current situation in the Spinner cavern, there was precious little chance of any foreigner sneaking off on their own and stealing something. As for Meredith—well, if Perez had something devious in mind, the colonel had already proved he could take Perez's best attacks and use them to his own advantage.

And Peter was due at any minute.

"All right," she sighed. "Tomorrow morning I'll try to find your Directory. If I can get to it in ten minutes or less I'll copy it under 'Cris' on the general-access list.

But I'm not going to waste any more time on it than that. Clear?"

"I'm very grateful," Perez smiled, inclining his head toward her as he headed for the door. "If you'll excuse me now, I must get back to Crosse; I'm on earlymorning duty tomorrow. Good night, and thank you."

"Good night."

Closing the door firmly behind him, she leaned against it for a moment, working the irritation out of her system. Then, glancing at her watch, she headed to the kitchen to check on dinner.

She'd half expected Hafner to arrive as Perez was leaving, a confrontation that would probably have left a distinct damper on the evening. It was therefore with an odd sense of relief—odd, at least, for her—that she had to wait nearly ten minutes for Hafner's knock to finally come!

"Hi, Carmen," he greeted her with a tired-looking smile as she let him in. "Sorry I'm late."

"No problem," she assured him. "The lasagna just needs a twenty-second final heating and it'll be ready."

"Lasagna, eh? Pretty extravagant meal for a poor civil servant—getting this private apartment must have really gone to your head. The mozzarella alone probably cost a fortune in favors." He sat down at the table and peered admiringly at the folded napkin.

"Actually, it didn't, though I am anticipating things a bit." She set the micro and went to drain the vegetables. "The Rooshrike are going to start regular goods shipments from Earth as of Thursday, and I've made sure every other food package is heavy on these so-called luxury items."

"That'll be nice—I know it'll raise my morale a lot. You going to distribute it through normal military channels or set up special stores?"

"I don't know." The micro pinged and she carefully carried the steaming dish to the table. "I'd like to start moving toward a normal economic system, but Colonel Meredith thinks things are still too unstable for that. Anyway, I'm not sure a luxury food store is the way to start. It smacks too much of the foreign-currencyonly places in Moscow."

"Yeah." Almost reluctantly, she thought, he unfolded his napkin. "I wish I'd had a bottle of wine to bring, but I don't have friends in high places like you do."

"Except Gorgon's Heads."

He smiled wryly. "And with friends like them—" Shaking his head, he dug into his food.

"Rough day, I gather?" Carmen asked, pouring them each some water.

"More just dead-dull boring," he shrugged. "I'm not even doing anything aside from sitting there keeping the Gorgon's Heads quiet—it's everybody else that's photographing the control labels and computer-coding everything in sight. I never before realized how tiring it gets sitting around doing nothing."

"You can leave other people alone once they're in the tower, though, can't you?"

"Everywhere except the main control room. The top floor, I should say; we haven't actually proved it's the control room yet." He waved his fork. "But even in the other rooms no one can get to the stairs or elevators without one of us five escorting them. And heaven help anyone who tries leaving the tower itself.

Davidson tried it once and nearly got strangled by one of those tentacles."

"Ouch. I don't suppose there's any way to persuade that guard circle to go patrol the village or something."

"I'm sure there is—just as I'm sure there's a way to induct more people into the Grand Order of Den Mothers, as Al Nichols calls it. We just haven't found it yet."

"Mm." Carmen shook her head. "I still don't understand exactly why you five were able to get special status but nobody else can. It seems—well, sort of capricious."

"Not really." Hafner finished off his lasagna and helped himself to another spatulaful. "Actually, if Perez's theory is right, the Gorgon's Head system is being quite self-consistent. The five of us had made it to the control room without being challenged by either one of their own units or by anything else, so as far as the Gorgon's Heads were concerned we must have been supervisors and had to be recorded as such. But now that they've set up a cordon around the tower nobody else can get up there alone, and so no one else gets to be a supervisor."

"Leaving you five as rotating tour guides." The entire setup still seemed pretty bizarre, but if she worked hard at it she could believe it made sense. The Spinners were aliens, after all, she reminded herself.

"Actually, we're more like three to three and a half," he said. 'Colonel Meredith hardly ever comes by, and Perez and Major Barner together don't pull much more than a single shift. It almost makes me wish I hadn't supported the whole Council idea way back when—at least then Perez wouldn't always be pulling 'official business' on us and ducking out."

"If there weren't any Council, Perez wouldn't have been there in the first place,"

Carmen pointed out. "It would've just been the other four of you."

"Plus thirty soldiers, if I hadn't gotten all righteous about that," he grumbled.

"Someday maybe I'll learn to keep my mouth shut."

They ate in silence for a few minutes. The dining nook window faced west, and through it she could see that the lights of the admin complex were still ablaze.

Finishing up the details on our trade proposals? she wondered. Or still trying to figure out how to code the Spinner script? Probably both. For a while she'd been resentful that no one had informed her when the Spinner tunnel was unearthed—by her reckoning she'd done more than her fair share for both the alien device and the people involved, and she'd deserved to share in some of the triumph, too. Now, though, she was just as glad she'd been somewhere else. She was already indispensable to too many projects.

"Penny for them."

She focused on Hafner again. "Sorry—just thinking about all the work we have to do to make Astra economically stable." She sighed. "And so much of it depends on how fast we can learn to control the Spinneret."

Hafner pursed his lips and looked out the window himself. "Carmen … what are the races out there planning to do with the cable they buy from us? You have any ideas?"

She frowned. "No, not really."

"It's not an idle question," he went on, almost as if he hadn't heard her. "The Spinners went to incredible lengths to build this place—someday soon I'll take you down to see their village, and I guarantee you'll be floored by it. But why did they do it? Suck an entire planet dry of its metals to make six-centimeter cables—what were they using the stuff for?"

"Any number of things," she shrugged. "We've worked up a three-page list of possibilities ourselves, and we don't know half of what there is to know about the cable yet."

He shook his head. "You're missing my point. The buildings down there—the whole Spinneret, for that matter—everything's lasted a hundred thousand years.

Why on Earth would any culture make something that lasts that long?"

She started to speak, then paused. It wasn't a trivial question. "Maybe they were building the ultimate city back on their home world or something. Maybe a tomb or memorial, like the pyramids or the Taj Mahal."

"Or maybe a cage for something very big and long-lived," he said quietly. "That's one of the possibilities that keep occurring to me."

She grimaced. "That one I'd rather not think about. Maybe— well, maybe they just lived a lot longer than we do. In terms of lifetimes, then, the cable may not seem exceptionally durable."

"Maybe." Hafner leaned back in his chair. "That list you mentioned—any overtly military uses on it?"

"I—" She frowned. "Now that you mention it, no, there aren't."

"The colonel's playing it cool," Hafner nodded heavily. "But I doubt that it's doing any good. None of the races out there are dumb enough or naive enough to have missed the warfare possibilities."

She nodded silently. It was a topic she and Meredith had never discussed openly, but from the very beginning it had fluttered like a vulture over the trade negotiations. Using that superconducting solenoid to throw missiles; wrapping a warship in unbreakable cable; hurling a giant tangler thread among an enemy's ships to glue them randomly together—practically every peaceful use had its darker flip side. "I don't suppose there's any way we can dictate how our clients use their cables, though," she said aloud. "I think that's one reason Colonel Meredith wants all the aliens to have equal access to the cables, to minimize any strategic advantages it might provide."

"It could still foul up the political balance, though, maybe in more subtle ways,"

Hafner said. "Suppose one of the empires out there is having internal dissent, a problem maybe that the central government could quickly crush with a cablewrapped spaceship. That would free the government's resources and attention to be turned to its neighbors."

"What would you have us do, then?" Carmen growled, knowing full well that he wasn't attacking her personally, but still feeling compelled to defend her project.

"Turn Astra over to the UN? Or pull out entirely and let the Rooshrike have it?

Either way, the cable's going to be made and used by someone. The genie's out, Peter; you can't stuff it back in its bottle."

He held up his hands, palms outward. "Peace. I wasn't picking on you or your work—and as far as genies go, I did my fair share to pop the cork. I just … that's the other possibility that keeps coming back to me. Maybe the Spinners used the cable material for warfare, too. If the crew here was recalled to help fight and never made it back … well, that would explain why the Spinneret was left running."

She shuddered. "You would bring that up, wouldn't you?"

"Sorry." He shook his head. "Look, let's get off the whole subject, okay? I didn't bring any wine, but I did bring some music. Why don't you put it on while I clear the table, and then you can pick up the story of your life again. I think we'd made it through high school last time."

She forced a chuckle and accepted the cassette he handed her. "All right—but this time you start."

"If you insist," he said, stacking the plates. "But I warn you: I was a very dull person in college."

They both did their best, but it was clear the mood of the evening had been irreparably darkened, and Hafner left early.

Is this how it's going to be now? Carmen wondered as she undressed for bed an hour later, the book she'd tried reading abandoned for lack of concentration. Is the Spinneret going to so dominate life here that we'll never be able to shut it out?

Oh, don't be so dramatic, she chided herself. You're tired, you're overworked, and you're feeling sorry for yourself. Ride it out, girl; at the very least, nothing more can happen to you until morning.

But she was wrong.

It was still the dead of night when the insistent buzz of her phone dragged her out of a surrealistic melding of all the war movies she'd ever seen. "Hello?" she answered groggily, knocking the instrument into bed with her before she could get her fingers to close on it.

"Carmen? This is Colonel Meredith. How fast can you pull yourself together and get out to Martello?"

"Uh … half an hour, I suppose," she said, still not fully awake. "What's, uh, going on?"

"One of the UN's ships has just arrived in orbit and is sending a shuttle down," he told her. "Aboard are our old friend Ashur Msuya … and President Allerton."

"Allerton?" she asked unbelievingly, the last remnants of fog evaporating in a rush.

"That's what I said—and as the old line goes, I've got a bad feeling about this.

Whatever they're up to, I want you there, both as Council head and chief trade negotiator."

"Yes, sir. Are you bringing anyone else in?"

"Just you and me and possibly Major Brown. Why?"

"Well … I don't know, Colonel, but it sounds to me like we're about to be delivered an ultimatum. Perhaps we ought to have a small delegation there, a delegation that would more completely represent the population."

There was a short pause. "The danger is that a group like that would display a complete lack of unity, which I presume is the exact opposite of your intent."

"True. But Msuya, at least, already knows about the Council and the fact that you listen to it. At least occasionally."

"That's why you're going to be there."

"Yes, sir … but I'm not in control of the Council. I can certainly back you up on anything you say, but if the Council as a whole doesn't agree we could have trouble later."

"In other words, you think I should invite Perez," Meredith said flatly.

Carmen swallowed. "Yes, sir. And maybe Dr. Hafner, too, as representative of the scientists."

The silence this time was longer. "I suppose you're right," he said at last, reluctantly. "In the short run we can afford squabbles in front of Msuya more than we can afford riots in front of the Rooshrike. In the long run … well, that'll have to take care of itself. All right, I'll give them a call. Be at the Martello conference room as soon as you can; the shuttle's due in under an hour, and I'd like time to confer with you first."

Carmen already had the phone strapped to her wrist and was pulling on her underwear. "Half an hour or less, sir."

"Good. By the way—any particular reason you suggested Perez and Hafner?"

"Yes, sir. Since they've seen the Spinner cavern, I thought they might have a clearer idea of what's at stake here. That might make a difference."

He grunted. "I hope you're right. See you soon."