Downtime (17 page)

“You’re
going on a lot of assumptions and guesses, Jason,” Calla said, shaking her
head.

Jason
nodded. “All of them formed because of what I’ve observed. It has to start
somewhere.”

“Well,
I would like to help,” Arria said eagerly, “but I can’t think of what will
help.”

“Don’t
worry about that,” Jason said. “I think we’ll discover that you know more than
you think you know.”

“And
more than she ought,” Daniel said unhappily as he took the plates from Arria’s
hands. He dished out the stew and handed out the plates. “If the storm’s
stalled, you won’t be able to leave until morning. I’m loaded up with cocoons.
Maybe you’d take back a few bales for me in your zephyr, hold ’em for me ’til I
come to trade.”

“How
did you know anyone wanted them?”

“Heard
it this very morning in the ranger broadcast.”

“And
you already have bales?”

Daniel
shrugged. “Will you take them?”

“I
can do that,” Jason said, testing the stew. Apparently he found it to his liking,
for he took several spoonsful in rapid succession.

“You
couldn’t a few months ago when I told you I had more than I could carry,” Daniel
said. “You wouldn’t bring me back here in a zephyr.”

“If
I ran a ferry service for every miner on the planet, we would never have time
for anything but. However, a few months ago you were not giving up your
valuable time to danae research. I consider it a fair trade. I hope you do,
too.”

Daniel
grunted and Calla knew he would ask no additional favors.

“We
go to bed early around here,” Daniel said when the meal was finished. He was
gathering up the plates and starting for the cave entrance, no doubt to set
them out in the rain for a washing. “We can make you pretty comfortable back
there on our cocoons if you’d like to rest.” He gestured back beyond the fire
into the tunnel darkness.

“Might
as well,” Calla said in answer to Jason’s questioning look. “The station knows
where we are. There’s nothing we can do until the storm’s over.”

“Let
me fix the cocoons,” Arria said through a yawn. She glanced at Jason and Calla
and grabbed a firebrand from the fire and before her father could answer, she
hurried into the deeper tunnel.

“I’ll
see that everything’s suitable for gold worlds,” Jason said, also taking a
brand from the fire.

“Don’t
patronize, Jason,” she said without malice. “You don’t do it well enough.”

He
shrugged. “Can’t learn everything.”

“Close
though. You handled Daniel very well. Couldn’t have done better myself. Now
that you’ve got the compliment you were hoping for, answer a question.”

“Sure.”

“Did
you plan any of this with Arria?”

Jason
frowned. “You mean, did she coach me on how to approach her father?”

“No,”
Calla said. “I mean was she reading you mind as well as I think she was.”

Jason
nodded. “I believe she was. Or, maybe I was projecting my own interpretations
into her reactions . . . the smile, the blushing. Could have
been as innocent and coincidental as danae coming out of the sky just in time
to share the food in your pack with Tonto.”

“All
right,” she said. “You’ve made your point.” But as she watched him walk to the
back chamber, she wondered if he ever would understand that even when she could
not give her unconditional support, it did not mean she was trying to undermine
or defeat him.

When
Arria came back, she took a few choice logs from the stack of firewood. “You’ll
need these later on,” she said handing them to Calla. And with that, she went
to one of the two low cots in the corner and began fluffing the cocoons there.
Daniel joined her, minus the plates.

Calla
took out her pocket torch and started down the tunnel.

About
twenty meters back the tunnel turned and dead-ended into what must have been
the Jinns’ storage room. There was an old trunk and an explosives locker shoved
against the back wall. Cocoons were baled and bundled and stacked from the rock
floor to the ceiling. This was not the result of one day’s work. Off to the
side a small fire blazed, and Jason sat at the edge of a comfortable-looking
arrangement of cocoons. His hair had dried into wild messy curls that made him
look slightly demonic in the firelight. The smile that had brightened him all
through the evening was gone; he looked pensive.

“Something
wrong?” Calla said.

First
Jason nodded, then he shook his head. Looking up at her, he shrugged. “She made
one bed for us.”

Calla
glanced around and realized it was true. She laughed. “We can fix that,” she
said, putting down the wood.

“Yeah,
I know we can, but Arria made one bed because . . .” He shrugged
again, helplessly.

Calla
bit her lip and stayed where she was, keeping the fire between them. “She’s an
inexperienced psi,” she suggested cautiously.

For
a moment Jason was quiet, his face almost like one grieving. “I wish I were
psi. Then I would know why you stopped loving me.”

She
crossed her arms and hugged her elbows. Her heart pounded fearfully. “What do
you mean?”

He
looked at her, faintly flushed and seemingly annoyed, but whether with her or
himself she could not tell. “You let me go. You never once so much as hinted
that I could do anything else. When had it ended for you? I never had a clue.”

“You
think that because I didn’t try to stop you, I didn’t love you?” She shook her
head. “Jason, I let you go
because
I
loved you. Those ten years at the Academy were the worst years of your life;
you were so ill-suited. You belonged in the mountains of Dovia, but you couldn’t
go there. I would have followed you if they had let me, but I couldn’t hold
you. If I had, it would have gone on the way it was, with you absolutely
miserable every day of Praetorian service.”

Jason
nodded. “I didn’t want to stay in the guard, but I would have if you had asked.”

“I
know that. It’s precisely why I didn’t ask you to. I think that if I had, our
love surely would have died.”

“When
they ungrounded you, why didn’t you come after me?”

She
shook her head. “I thought of it, but I never had heard one word from you in
all those years. I had adjusted, and I thought you probably had, too. It was
best to leave it be.”

“Sensible,”
he said, “but I never really adjusted, not if you mean by adjustment that I
stopped loving you.” He looked at her. “Am I making a big fool of myself?”

She
couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak.

“Please,”
he said, grieving again. “Why is it that you are so suspicious of love? Why do
you still shy away from it? Is that how you adjusted? By denying it? Say
something.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “Yes, tears will do. Calla, I want you
here beside me, all through the night I want you to be by me.”

Now
she could feel the tears that he had seen and she fought to control them. He
was getting up, reaching out for her, and she knew she could stop him with one
harsh word, but she remained silent until his arms were around her. She slipped
her arms around him, pressed her face against his chest and held on. “This can
only lead to unhappiness,” she said softly.

“I
don’t give a Timekeeper’s damn where it leads,” Jason said, “as long as we can
be together again.”

“It
can’t last,” Calla protested.

“Why
not? It’s lasted all these years, hasn’t it?”

Yes,
she thought, but I won’t think of how many years, not now while we’re holding
each other with nothing more than soft firelight to remind him. Maybe tomorrow
we’ll think about how many years.

There were no secrets on Mutare. No confirmations, no
announcements, but no secrets either. The community was too small to hide
anything for very long, let alone a full-scale elixir manufacturing facility.
Jason’s rangers, one hundred skilled surveyors, rock cutting terriers,
technicians, planetologists of various disciplines, and bean counters, had come
to Mutare to establish a moderate Mercurian outpost. Even those who had never
been on a downtime world before knew Mutare had been transformed from an
ordinary outpost to a mysterious one when they began construction of the
immense Red Rocks facility. When Calla arrived with her four hundred
technicians and a contingent of Praetorian guards, each of whom had a well-rehearsed
job description about cosmic ray research, Jason’s rangers were certain they
were involved with covert preparation for the uptime war that was rumored to be
brewing. Once the new facility began operating and spewing copious quantities
of acid and solvents into the back canyon, no one believed the cosmic ray
research stories anymore and many suspected that elixir was being manufactured
on Mutare. It was too odd that not one of Calla’s people hailed from an elixir
manufacturing world, much too odd. By the time the
Belden Traveler
left (reputedly ordered downtime instead of
returning to the Hub as would be normal when a supply run was finished) it was
something of a joke among the rangers, guards, and civilian “researchers” to
guess which worlds they were
not
from. Since the officers didn’t put a stop to it and even partook of the sport
themselves occasionally, the rangers came to understand that the secret elixir
installation on Mutare was not secret from them, but was being concealed from
the Hub.

It
didn’t take them three months to figure out that the Praetorian guard commander
and the ranger-governor of Mutare were not having all night staff meetings, the
need for which had commenced during a forced-down to wait out an electrical
storm in a miner’s camp. It took only three days. Then Calla simply abandoned
any pretense of having only a professional relationship with Jason by inviting
him to sit with her on a little cocoon-filled cushion in front of the fireplace
that was kept blazing in the Round House staging area even in the summertime,
and then putting her hand possessively on his knee. No one was more surprised
than Jason by that small gesture, and it took him a full ten minutes to muster
enough courage just to slip his arm around her back in such a fashion that only
his fingers were touching her hip. Very casual looking.

Even
that much was a sharp change from the officer he knew ten years ago who would
have put him on report for a lapse like that on base. A part of him believed
that her new openness carne from the self-confidence of wearing gold worlds on
her shoulders, for who among them would challenge the behavior of a gold
commander? The other part of him believed that Calla enjoyed practicing a new
kind of discipline, one that cued him with the very sound of her voice so he
would not mistake her professional demeanor for the private — ever. He did
likewise, and was pleased to learn he could be just as exemplary a
lover/officer as she. Even so, sometimes Jason just wanted to be alone with Calla,
and not only just in one of their rooms. They stole minutes in the mornings at
the garden terrace, an hour here and there to go to the Amber Forest, today,
several hours to eat their supper at the seaside while the sun went down behind
them.

They
sat on moonlighted rocks at the shore of Mer Sal, holding hands while they
watched a small flock of danae consorting just a few meters away. Most of the
willowy creatures apparently were finished scavenging for mollusks and other
tidal tidbits, but it still resembled a family picnic. Builder was examining
bits of driftwood and flotsam trapped among the rocks and half a dozen other
danae watched her idly from their rocky perches, wing scrolls drooping, either
from fatigue or in utter relaxation. Well down the beach was Tonto, the only
young danae with the outing, standing defiantly close to the encroaching tide.
The danae were eerily silent, as always.

“There
he goes again,” Calla whispered as Tonto stepped delicately into the lapping
waves. The long stick-like legs barely made ripples.

The
young danae had waded only a short distance before he stopped, turned to look
at the adult danae, and then retreated above the waterline. Jason and Calla had
seen Tonto perform this ritual a dozen times this evening, and Jason had the
distinct impression that Tonto was warned away from the water every time he
started to wade.

Earlier,
while all the danae were feasting, Tonto had broken suddenly from the group and
dived, wings unfurling like giant fins. The elder danae had reacted with
obvious panic until the youngster surfaced and returned to the shore,
shimmering scales and membranous wings dripping seawater, only to stand and
stare longingly at the sea, the compound eye in back focused on the foraging
adults.

“I
wish Arria were here,” Jason said wistfully.

“What
do you think she would tell you that you can’t see with your own eyes?” Calla
asked. “It’s obvious that the danae love seafood and that Tonto is dismayed
that he is not permitted to go right to the source.”

“It
does look that way, doesn’t it,” he said. “It has to be a result of his sea
mammal . . . uh, ancestry. Timekeeper, we don’t even have terms
for what they are.”

“You
don’t know what they are for sure, Jason,” she said cautiously. “Tonto could be
an exception among all danae. You must admit that you haven’t seen the other
danae exhibit any behavior that could be construed as the instincts given them
by their animal ancestor.”

“These
danae are too civilized,” Jason said. “Their animal ancestry is probably
generations removed, maybe a thousand times removed. And we don’t know enough
about animal life on Mutare in general to recognize it for sure if we did see
it. A swimming danae is unusual, but if one were browsing in the meadow because
he was once a minotaur, I’m not sure it would look much different than Old
Blue-eyes browsing because he likes candleberries. If Arria were here, she
might be able to tell us if Tonto has a diving song and if he does, why he
doesn’t share it with the other danae.”