Rediscovery (21 page)

Aldaran’s men swarmed over it, prying off every piece they could with their

primitive equipment. That at least convinced Evans that there weren’t any “secret electronic devices” spying on the Terrans, for the workers showed neither interest in nor understanding of broken circuitry and electronics except for metal content. They scavenged every bit of copper, however; no bit, however small, was overlooked,

convincing MacAran that in terms of the value of the metal, Aldaran had gotten the better of the deal, or thought he had!

One day later, another shuttle landed, bringing with it a crew to cut up the

wrecked shuttle and remove the remaining usable equipment. Aldaran’s men spent the day hauling away pieces of metal still hot from the torches; by day’s end, there was nothing left to show that the shuttle had landed there but the mess in the snow. Even tiny bits of plastic had been picked up and carried off; within two days, Ysaye saw some of the villagers, and even some of the “Comyn” women in Aldaran’s castle, wearing

carefully set and polished bits of plastic as jewelry.

Two days after that, in a great barren space outside a village that Lord Aldaran had called
Caer Donn,
Ysaye watched the starship settle down, creating its own null-grav field to drop onto the snow like a huge feather. Everyone from the castle was there, and most of the villagers—and not all their familiarity with the two shuttles kept the castle folk from gaping with the same astonishment as the villagers.

Ysaye was very glad to see it. She was tired to death of being cold, of smoky

fires, of the strange food. She was even wearier of the constant threat of allergy attacks.

Twice now, she had gone to Aurora for emergency treatment; once, she had required oxygen. One of the effects of her allergies, during an extreme attack, was hypoxia; she had already found herself sitting on the floor of Aurora’s makeshift sickbay, dizzy, weak, befuddled, and not quite certain where she was. A dangerous condition to be in…

Even more dangerous; another effect was toxemia, and the potential to literally

become allergic to herself. She was glad to be back inside the controlled environment of the ship.

With the help of what she could only conclude was her new power of telepathy,

she had learned the rudiments of the language Lord Aldaran spoke,
casta,
and had accompanied Elizabeth as she began making assessments of the level of culture showed in the village of Caer Donn and in the Aldaran castle. But she longed for her computers and her screens, her sensors and her data files. No matter how interesting all this was, she was tired of seeing it at first-hand. She wanted the buffering of her computers between her and this too-real reality.

So far, everything she and Elizabeth had seen indicated that the culture was

precisely what they had thought: a pre-industrial society, without much manufacturing capability, on a metal-poor world with a fragile economy, and an even more fragile ecology, based mostly upon simple agriculture. Unless someone discovered something here that could be
grown
that was worth exporting, there would be very little these people could offer besides handmade novelties. Of course, there was a fairly brisk, if limited, interstellar trade in such things. Items of wood, leather, fur—art objects—even music and musical instruments—all found their way into the luxury trade. So it might well be that some trade could be established, although, of course, what they really had to offer was their location. The Terran Empire would pay the locals quite well for the privilege of establishing a spaceport here.

She and Elizabeth had seen a blacksmith in the village, a jeweler; a bakery where all the village came to bake their own loaves, combined with a simple cookshop where a man made stews and roasts, with his wife and daughters to wait on the customers; a public bathhouse which Elizabeth believed served the purposes of a social hall and whorehouse (Ysaye hoped it wasn’t used for both at the same time, and looked forward to returning to the ship for a hot shower); a tavern; a small, open-air theater which stood dark and deserted, though some people said that acrobats and ballad singers and the like came there at fair time to entertain; a butcher shop; and a seller of simple clothes and leather boots and packaging material such as bags and sacks. Elizabeth had wondered aloud what the influx of Terran style goods and services would do to these people.

Ysaye thought she knew; it would spoil them for their own goods. She had only to see a brisk bargaining session over a piece of scavenged plastic sheeting to know how much the locals would come to value Terran goods, whether or not their own officials liked it or approved of it.

And doubtless, Ysaye thought with disgust, when the inevitable black market

arose, Evans would be in the thick of it, if not the originator.

The ship had sent messages back to Terra, and Elizabeth jittered about, waiting

for the results. Captain Gibbons and his officers would divide the finders’ fee for this world; that was normal procedure. That was not what Elizabeth was worried about; she was concerned with how this new world would be classified.

If the official powers of the Space Service decided there was no reason to restrict the place and to bring it fully into the Terran Empire as an Open world, it would be opened to exploration and various means of exploitation.

But if it was a world to be protected by Closed status, they would all be back on the ship and gone within the month. David and Elizabeth would not even have an

opportunity to do the work they found so rewarding, and, of course, it would mean postponing their marriage.

All that, resting on a decision following a hearing by Empire Central.

Ysaye herself could not have cared less if they all packed up and left for the next world, but she knew that Elizabeth cared passionately. The worst part, Ysaye knew, was that Elizabeth was literally torn between wanting the place granted Open and wanting it granted Closed status. If it were to be Opened, she and David could settle down, and devote themselves to a culture that was not only fascinating to them, but one that they actively liked. But if it were Opened, that left this place vulnerable to those like Evans, who saw nothing without calculating how much they could get out of it. A Closed status would protect them from that—but it would mean, not only that Elizabeth and David would have to leave, but that the people themselves would lose the considerable benefits of becoming a member of the Empire.

The second shuttle had been commanded by Captain Gibbons himself. The

captain was a small slender man with shaggy hair and wrinkled skin. Ysaye had no idea how old he was; he seemed ageless. She heard that he had begun his career as engineer’s mate, because as a small man he could get into places where larger men could not go; at that time there had been no women in the Service, and even now, the ones that chose to go into Engineering were few and far between. Captain Gibbons still knew his way around every nook and corner of the ship, and, it was said that if he could not fix anything aboard, it could not be fixed at all. Certainly, he took an active interest in things mechanical and electrical, and it had been by his own decision that the first shuttle had been declared beyond repair.

Now that the ship had landed, the Captain had fewer duties with regard to it, and more with regard to what the
de facto
First Contact team had learned. Ysaye was not at all surprised when he summoned them to his office for “an informal debriefing.”

Ysaye let Elizabeth do most of the talking. She was just happy to be back on

shipboard, warm and fresh from a hot shower and wearing a clean uniform. Breathing air that, at last, didn’t smell
of
something: smoke, cooking meat, lighting oil, animal waste, sweat.

He took their reports and listened with interest to what Elizabeth said of telepathy.

“Well, Intelligence thought enough of the possibility to put you and David

aboard,” he said mildly. “We can’t entirely rule it out.”

But when the Captain approached Evans and asked for his opinion on the subject,

he got an entirely different view.

“Oh, come on, Captain; who do these people think they’re kidding! Telepathy that works only for some people? I’ll just bet,” Evans scoffed. “It makes a great excuse for not understanding someone you don’t
want
to understand.” He took all the sampling devices he could carry and disappeared outside; in fact, he wasn’t in the ship much at all anymore. Ysaye got the impression that he was setting up his own little lab outside somewhere—though why he was doing so outside and not in the perfectly good

facilities of the ship was still a mystery to her. Still, she admitted, if he wanted to do anything illegal…

Aurora gratefully accepted the various paraphernalia of the language computers

and corticators and began working with David to set them up; most within the ship, but some in a room in Kermiac Aldaran’s castle, so that certain of the natives, if they chose, could learn Terran Standard. That was one side benefit of having fumbled the First Contact; at this point, things were so badly off-program that it no longer mattered what they showed the natives, or exposed them to.

The man Kadarin—if he was a man—had been the first to volunteer for the

strange-looking machines, and the happy result was that they not only had a Terran Standard speaker among the natives, but they had excellent records for the Terrans to learn both
casta
and another language called
cahuenga
that many of the peasants spoke.

Once Kadarin had survived his bout with the corticators, he had at once begun to chatter technical terms with Britton and the Captain, and had exerted himself, so MacAran said, to find a site for further ships to land.

No one seemed terribly surprised to learn that he considered Caer Donn the

perfect site for more landings. Captain Gibbons concurred. Here, Ysaye realized, if the Terran spaceport could be built at all, it would rise, near to Aldaran’s influence. Whether it could rise at all, only time would tell.

At least part of the time, she was sure that the residents of Cottman IV would

wish to become a Terran Colony like any other. It seemed so logical—after all, these people
were
Terran, didn’t they deserve the benefits of being Terran? Of course Empire Central would have to rule on that one.

The rest of the time, she was afraid that it would turn into a Terran Colony—

whether the natives liked it that way or not. Although she found it hard to believe, there
were
people who didn’t consider the things the Empire offered to be “benefits.” She was troubled sometimes; mostly when she overheard Evans, making plans with Kadarin.

As soon as Kadarin had learned Standard, Evans had drafted him to show him

about and help him carry things, and Ysaye noticed that their conversations often changed subject abruptly as other people approached them. Some of the little that she overheard made her distinctly uncomfortable. She did not think that planning for exports was ethical, not before a final report by ecologists, psychologists, and sociologists on the society.

The rules of the Terran Empire itself demanded such a report before any trade was established; but already there seemed to be considerable local enthusiasm for the idea.

Plans had at least been discussed for the building of the spaceport, for the employment of local labor, and for supplying some of the spaceship’s people with fresh food—which at least would be good for local agriculture and economics, or so Kermiac of Aldaran had given them to understand. And he had hinted at the favors he would like granted, for the concession of having the spaceport on his land.

Ysaye knew that Kermiac wanted weapons, and she did not know if that was

permissible. As she understood the matter, that would be interfering in local politics; always a bad idea, considering what local politics were. She understood that Aldaran was like an independent kingdom, with Lorill Hastur representing another kingdom to the south of here, where the climate was considerably more hospitable. She thought that the standard operating procedure was to examine both societies, and look more

thoroughly into the relationships between them, before making any decisions on the sale of even low-tech weapons.

She had finally approached Lorill Hastur about it; obliquely, she thought. Lorill had remained very much in the background of what was going on—always watching,

but never interfering, and not often commenting.

But you must realize,
Lorill Hastur had commented in that unspoken speech,
that
we of the Domains claim overlordship over Aldaran. They do not always admit it, but
we are their sovereigns. Anything that Aldaran can do to press his independence from
us, he shall.

If this should be true, it put quite another face on the whole matter, especially on Aldaran’s wish for weapons. It was strictly against Empire policy to take sides in purely local struggles, or to adjudicate causes, even if the struggle seemed based on something as meaningless to Terrans as the proverbial struggle in Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
between the Big-endians and the Little-endians. There was a well known Terran Empire proverb:
It is not up to us to determine by which end other peoples shall eat their eggs.

Unfortunately there had been many examples in which this law had been honored more in the breach than the observance.

Ysaye decided the best thing she could do in the situation was to stay out of it, and went to check the computer status logs. To her great relief, no catastrophes appeared to have taken place during her absence. She returned to her cabin, appreciating the luxury of being able to go back to a truly warm room as she had not been able to do in weeks, and pulled out her music synthesizer keyboard. She set it for harpsichord and played through Bach’s
Two-Part Inventions
until her fingers finished thawing out.

The next morning Elizabeth came to her with the news that she and David had