Deadman Switch (27 page)

Chi blinked at the unexpected question. “I don't understand what you're asking.”

“They're not mobile, are they? I've seen the original survey team reports—their roots go pretty deep into the ground. Surely they aren't able to pull them up and move elsewhere.”

“No, of course not. That's why the whole idea of them being intelligent—”

“Is ridiculous,” Randon finished for him. “Yes, we know. And yet, they're aware enough to know that you're studying them. True?”

He hesitated. “We don't yet have any hard evidence of that.”

“So check me on it,” I suggested, beginning to feel annoyed with the man. “Have Calandra brought here—I presume she's being held somewhere nearby? We'll watch one of your test thunderheads and see if we can both spot the exact moment when it returns again.”

Chi made a sour face. “The collusion between two Watchers would hardly—”

“Wait a minute,” Kutzko interrupted him, turning to me with a frown. “What do you mean, when it returns again? Returns from where?”

“It was just a figure of speech—” Chi began.

“Quiet,” Randon said. “Well, Benedar?”

I opened my mouth … closed it again. It
had
been just a figure of speech … hadn't it? No; it hadn't. “I don't understand it fully myself,” I said at last. “But the thunderheads don't feel dormant so much as they feel … empty.”

The word seemed to hang in the air, held there by the thick silence that had settled into the hollow. Even without looking I could tell that the techs around us had all ceased their work and were listening.

Chi could tell it, too, and it perhaps kept him from being as sarcastic aloud as he would otherwise have been. “Well,” he said at last. “That's a rather interesting interpretation. To say the least.”

Randon ignored him. “Are you suggesting that it's not the thunderheads themselves that are sentient? That they're just playing host to some kind of non-physical consciousness?”

“It doesn't have to be that sharp edged, sir,” one of the techs spoke up, a bit hesitantly. His eyes flicked to me, as if seeking moral support. “It could be that the thunderheads are indeed sentient, but that they've learned how to … well, to allow their spirits to disassociate from their bodies.”

Chi glared at his subordinate. “If you don't mind, Allix,” he growled, “I'd like to try and handle this without resorting to mysticism. Religious upbringing,” he added with thinly veiled contempt to Randon.

The natural person has no room for the gifts of God's Spirit; to him they are folly; he cannot recognize them, because their value can be assessed only in the Spirit …
“Dr. Chi—”

Randon silenced me with a wave of his hand. “So why is it so ridiculous?” he asked Chi coolly.

The other blinked in surprise.
“Why?
Mr. Kelsey-Ramos—well, all right; for starters, it makes no sense from an evolutionary standpoint—”

“Why not? Especially given that they can't move physically, why shouldn't they have found a way of getting around on a different plane?”

“You're talking mysticism—”

“I'm talking different levels of reality,” Randon snapped. “Mjollnir space used to be considered mysticism, too, you know. Superluminal travel, electric currents creating artificial gravity—the whole thing's patently unreal by all the rules that were known half a millennium ago.”

“Spare me the history lesson, if you please,” Chi said stiffly. “The problem is that there's no way an evolutionary process could have come up with this sort of thing.”

“Then forget evolution,” I said, suddenly tired of swimming upstream against this man. “Surely somewhere in the Patri and colonies there are more sensitive instruments available—”

“Or in other words,” Chi cut me off, “you want the Patri to make a nova-class fuss over this, simply on the strength of a Watcher's word. Let me explain something, Benedar: I have a reputation and a career, and chasing ghosts is
not
how I got them. If we find some evidence—
hard
evidence, I mean—in the next couple of days, then we'll see.”

“And if you don't?” Randon asked.

“Then we pack up and go back to Solitaire.” Chi's lip twitched knowingly. “And you'll have to make some other kind of deal to get your Watcher back.”

Beside me, Kutzko stirred. “Hard evidence, huh?” he asked.

We all looked at him … and again I shivered. He was preparing for action … “Mikha—”

He turned hard eyes on me, and I shut up. “Your permission, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos?” he asked.

Randon frowned, but nodded. “Go ahead.”

Kutzko nodded back and turned to the Pravilo officer still standing nearby. “Sir, I'll need my needler. Please signal your men not to react.”

The other eyed him thoughtfully, gave a brisk nod. “Guards!—clear weapon!” he shouted.

“Thank you.” Carefully, Kutzko eased his needler from its holster, keeping it pointed at the ground. “Dr. Chi, would you say that the smarter something is, the faster it ought to learn?”

Chi licked his lips nervously. He had no idea where Kutzko was headed with this, but already he didn't like it. “I suppose it would be a fairly accurate generalization.”

“Fine.” Kutzko looked at me. “Which ones are the most awake, Gilead?”

I swallowed. “Pretty much all of them, except the ones being monitored.”

“That one, for instance?” he asked, raising his needler to point it at a nearby thunderhead.

I studied it a moment. “Yes,” I acknowledged.

“No change right now?”

“No.”

“Fine.” He lowered the weapon again and took a quiet preparing breath. “Keep watching it. See if it learns that a needler is something to be afraid of.”

He took a few steps toward the thunderhead. Beside me, Chi and Randon were both watching him unblinkingly; from the tight silence in the hollow, I could tell everyone else was doing the same. Lifting his needler, Kutzko aimed at the far bluff and fired twice.

The shots shattered the silence, their ringing echoes almost covering the faint insect-whine of the needles ricocheting harmlessly off the distant rock. The silence returned … and Kutzko lowered his aim deliberately to the thunderhead he'd indicated—

An icy hand grabbed my heart. “Stop!” I shouted. “Don't shoot!”

The gun didn't move. “I'm not going to,” he frowned. “Did it leave?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, it did,” I told him. “Please—lower the gun.”

He held the pose another moment, then returned the needler to its holster and started back toward us. “What's wrong?” Randon murmured at my ear.

I shook my head, my brain scrambling to sort out the sensations that had jolted me into shouting my warning. “I don't know, exactly. I felt a sudden surge of emotion from the entire city, directed at Kutzko. And there was a … it was like a flicker of light, only too short to really see.”

“A flicker of light you couldn't really see, huh?” Chi said dryly. “Well,
that
makes sense.”

My stomach knotted with frustration. Peripherally, I noted that the threatened thunderhead had now returned to full consciousness. “The flash was there,” I insisted.

Kutzko reached us and stopped. “Well, Doctor?” he asked coolly. “That convince you?”

Chi grimaced. “Not especially. I'm sorry, but again all we've got here is one man's impressions, without a shred of hard evidence anywhere—”

And a hunch clicked. “Mikha, give me your needler,” I cut Chi off.

Kutzko's forehead furrowed slightly. “Sir?” he asked the Pravilo officer.

The other nodded. “Go ahead.”

Drawing the gun from its holster, Kutzko offered me the grip. I took it and, gingerly, looked down the muzzle.

A centimeter down the barrel, a spiderweb had appeared, blocking the opening. A spiderweb composed of a dozen ultrathin filaments of metal …

Wordlessly, I handed the weapon to Randon. He looked … raised his eyes back to mine. “It's blocked,” he said, his voice hollow as he offered it to Chi. “Like it'd been … spot welded or something.”

I nodded, feeling cold all over. “They thought Mikha was going to start shooting at them. This was their way of stopping him.”

Chi looked up from the gun, a haunted look in his eyes. “But it
wouldn't
really have blocked the shot. Would it?”

Kutzko took the needler back, and his face hardened as he gazed in at the metal spiderweb. “Probably not,” he said. “Does it blazing-well matter?”

Chi took a ragged breath, his gaze drifting almost unwillingly to the thunderheads. To the thunderheads; who in the space of a few seconds had observed, evaluated, and taken precise action … “No,” he told Kutzko with a shiver. “I don't suppose it matters at all.”

I
WAS RETURNED TO
Solitaire and placed under what seemed to be a form of house arrest aboard the
Bellwether …
and for the next six weeks nothing happened.

Or at least, nothing that I expected to happen did so. No one came to charge me with any crimes, or to take me before the judiciary or even to a more official prison; the
Bellwether
made no attempt to leave the planet, let alone the system; and from what I could gather from my limited information sources, there was no reaction at all from the general Solitaran populace over the news that an alien intelligence had just been discovered on their sister world.

All of which implied that, even as courier ships were undoubtedly burning their way through Mjollnir space to bring the news to the Patri hierarchy, somewhere the decision had been made to keep the discovery secret. A bad idea, I thought, for several different reasons. But no one was asking my opinion.

I didn't see Calandra at all during that time. From the face and body language of the guards who brought me my meals I gathered that she too was back aboard, though no one would verbally confirm that. They also wouldn't tell me what, if anything, was happening with her case, and I spent many of the long hours replaying all that had happened and brooding about whether my fumbling attempts had made things any better for her. There was no way to know, and I could only console myself with the knowledge that I certainly hadn't made them any worse.

And finally, six weeks to the day after my imprisonment began, they came to get me.

We landed near the Butte City encampment where I'd first awakened from my pravdrug interrogation, an encampment that had changed drastically in the time I'd been locked up on Solitaire. The ship that had been at its center was still there, but the handful of soft-wall structures had been replaced by ten gleaming prebuilt sectional buildings, including what looked like a clean-room lab and two military-style barracks. The whole area had been cordoned off by a sensor fence, a fence that also enclosed our landing area and stretched out to define a wide corridor to the buttes. From my angle I couldn't tell if the buttes themselves had been fenced off, but I rather thought they had.

I was taken into the lab, and to a large office/workroom already starting to show signs of cluttering … and there I met the new head of the thunderhead project.

That he was the head was instantly clear. His manner, his bearing, the subtle exchange of body language between him and my guards—all of it pointed to absolute authority, and to a man accustomed to wearing it. From the way he looked at me—the thoughtful, probing way he sized me up as I walked with my Pravilo escort from the doorway to his desk—it was similarly clear that he was a man of science and not simply some Patri official or bureaucrat.

Just as it was clear that he didn't especially like me.

“Gilead Benedar, sir,” the head of my escort identified me. “Brought here as per your instructions.”

The scientist's eyes flicked to him. “Thank you, Captain. You and the others may go.”

The other nodded and signaled to his men, and the scientist and I were left alone.

For a long moment he continued to study me, giving me a vague feeling of being under a microscope. “So
you're
a Watcher,” he said at last. “Not exactly what I was expecting.”

I looked at his face, read the lie there. “That surprises me, sir,” I told him evenly. Another flicker— “Especially since you've read all the information the Patri has on Watchers in general and on me in particular.”

His reaction was mild surprise, open and obvious enough to practically light up the room. More confirmation, if I'd needed it, that he'd spent his life in science, insulated from the darker political and business worlds where a man usually learned to shield his thoughts and emotions more carefully.

But the surprise disappeared quickly, replaced by a strong and probably habitual skepticism. “Easy guess,” he grunted. “Of course I would have learned all I could before deciding to send for you.”

Another lie … “Perhaps,” I nodded. “Except that it wasn't really your idea to send for me. You don't like me, you didn't want me here, and you'd very much like an excuse to toss me back off Spall and be done with it.”

His face turned to stone, whatever traces of patronizing amusement he'd been feeling vanishing like smoke. “I see,” he said through stiff lips. “Oh—please continue, since you know so much. If I don't want you, why are you here?”

“Because you need my help,” I told him. “Because something about the thunderheads has you stymied, and you've been reduced to grasping at straws.”

He gazed steadily at me. “Do you know who I am?”

I shook my head. “My experience lately has mostly been in business and—”

“I'm Dr. Vlad Eisenstadt.”

I swallowed. It was a name even people preoccupied with business had heard of. A true Renaissance man of science, he was said to be equally proficient in biology, chemistry, cybernetics, and neuropsychology. In retrospect, I suppose, it was obvious that the Patri would have picked someone like him for this job. “I see, sir,” I said, not knowing what else to say.