Rediscovery (28 page)

Darkovans as had presented themselves for unskilled and semi-skilled labor. But there was no skilled labor pool here; there was no labor pool of those with any experience with even the most primitive machinery. For once, on a world with Iron Age culture, the Terrans were going to have to import such laborers, and the Captain found himself sending urgent communiques on a daily basis justifying this departure from Standard Operating Procedures.

He had begun consulting David for more creative ways of wording these missives,

hoping to make them sound more urgent.

“Who would have thought that there would be a planet with Iron Age culture that

didn’t have
some
kind of heavy dirt-moving equipment?” he asked, rhetorically. “Even the Romans had horse-drawn dredges and scrapers!”

“Be fair,” David admonished. “The surface and climate are such here that almost

any heavy machinery would be land-destroying, anti-ecological. It’s hard to believe how fragile the ecology here is; they’re one thin root layer away from losing whole

mountainsides to mud slides every year. That’s one reason why a lot of this land has been given over to sheep farming, and the shepherds watch how closely their pastures have been grazed over.” He looked out the window of the Captain’s office, and thought about how quick the locals had been to transplant turf and seedlings to the raw earth of the complex, once all the buildings were in place. It wasn’t anything that the Terrans had even thought of, but as soon as the barriers were down, the men who had been building each structure vanished, then returned with chunks of sod and seedlings from Aldaran’s greenhouse, swarming the place, and leaving greenery behind them. “Think about it, Captain; under circumstances like that, heavy machinery, even horse-powered, would be superfluous and even dangerous. So they never even thought of trying to use it.”

“But the castle—” Captain Gibbons protested. “Surely there was some use for

equipment like that in building Aldaran’s fortress! And that isn’t the only large-scale building here.”

“Lots of men with picks and shovels, lots of women and children with baskets to

carry off the unwanted earth to some of their terrace-gardens,” David replied calmly.

“That process eliminates a lot of damage to the environment, and makes for less loss to erosion. Have you seen how they’re insisting that the spaceport engineer work in sections no bigger than the castle, and pave each one before he goes on to the next one?

Same thing, same thinking.”

The Captain grimaced and shuffled some of the papers on his desk. “That’s

another thing that bothers me; people just don’t think that way. No population
starts off
with that kind of ecological and planetary consciousness.”

David shook his head, ruefully. “Captain, you are indulging in faulty logic. These people obviously
have
arrived at something like that kind of consciousness, so it doesn’t make sense to say that no one does.”

“But where did they get it?” Gibbons asked in frustration. “That’s what I’m

asking.”

David laughed, and made a note on one of the Captain’s draft communiques. “I

hope you weren’t asking me that, because I don’t have any answers,” he said. “No more of an idea, in fact, than you do.”

Captain Gibbons sighed. “Pity. I’d hoped that wife of yours had dug something up in her folk songs, or you had, in talking to these people. I suppose I’ll have to add it to the list of things our sociologists are supposed to be looking up.”

“In their copious spare time,” David added.

The Captain only grunted, and went back to formulating a plea for ecologically-

sound bulldozers and environmentally-correct backhoes.

There was another “city” growing up at Caer Donn; this one like a ring around the compact center of the Terran Zone, outside the fences of the Enclave, but also outside the old village of Caer Donn itself. It was growing just as rapidly as the Trade City, and it was no different from any other “city” of its type from one end of the Galaxy to the other. There was a universal name for this kind of settlement; the Native Quarter.

Like the other “cities” of its kind, the Native Quarter was devoted to those who provided services for the Terran newcomers.

These so-named Native Quarters, no matter where in the Galaxy they were

located, tended to be very much alike. First to move in were those who had been hired to build the spaceport and the buildings of the Zone. These were workers and artisans of all kinds; displaced men from Aldaran’s lands who were being trained in construction and the use of heavy machinery. Their quarters, spartan by most standards, were constructed even before the Married and Unmarried Personnel quarters. The Terrans could and did live in the ship; these men had nowhere else to go, for there were not enough beds in the village for all of them.

David glanced through the fence at the buildings of the Native Quarter, and noted that one had just sprouted a sign that had not been there this morning. A tavern? It seemed likely.

And where there are taverns and men,
David thought, a little sadly,
the brothels
will not be far behind.

It was only a matter of time. And only a matter of time before the Terrans—like

the few construction workers—were also using those native “facilities.”

Those half-dozen Terran experts in construction were quartered with the other

Terrans, inside the fences of the Enclave, but David had no doubt that they already knew about the tavern. They might even be inside it right now.

Given Captain Gibbons’ reactions this afternoon, David thought it might be a

good idea to stop at the HQ building before going home.

Home…
that had a good sound. Their house was finished now, although half the rooms were unfurnished. It was the first time in five years—three on the ship, two in training—that David had anything he could think of as a home.

Ysaye, as he had expected, was with her computer. She had supervised the

setting-up and initial configuring of the HQ computer; David rather hoped he could somehow convince her to stay when the ship lifted. Elizabeth had few enough friends, and it would hurt her to lose Ysaye. The bond between them had only strengthened in the face of the steadfast refusal of some of the Terrans to believe that Elizabeth could speak telepathically with the natives.

The black woman looked up at his footstep, and smiled. “Do you need to get into

the computer, David?” she asked.

“I’d like to have it run a cross-reference on—ah—‘ecologically sound principles’

and local mythology,” he said. “I know that’s vague, but—”

“But I can phrase it in a way the computer will understand,” Ysaye replied.

“Don’t get up your hopes, though; it probably won’t come up with much. We don’t have that much data on the locals yet.”

“What are you doing here at this hour?” he asked, curiously, watching as she

rephrased his question and loaded it into the statistical/sociological cross-referencing program.

“Oh—I thought something was likely to happen, and I was trying some rough

cross-references myself,” she replied vaguely.

“I suppose the computer told you that something was going to happen,” David

chuckled, leaning back as Ysaye ordered the system to run. “Or did you have another one of your premonitions?”

“Hmm. That would be telling.” She glanced up at him from the corner of her eye.

But that stray thought triggered another question he had about Ysaye. “You
do
talk to the computer, though, don’t you?” he persisted.

“What, as in having a conversation with it?” She frowned, but whether at his

question, or at a thought of her own, he couldn’t tell. “Well—I talk
at
it. I suppose that might sound as if I were talking to it. It’s mostly verbalizing thoughts out loud; I suppose it might sound like a conversation to an innocent bystander.”

“I thought once I was having a kind of conversation with it,” he offered. “It was a very strange experience.”

“Or one of the techs had programmed it to play Socrates with you, and ask you

leading questions based on keywords,” she pointed out dryly. “That was being done back in the twentieth century. But if you told it something like, ‘Einstein says everything is relative,’ it would say something like, ‘So tell me more about your relative Mr.

Einstein.’ It was the imitation of intelligence, not intelligence itself.”

“We still haven’t cracked that barrier of artificial intelligence,” David observed. “I can’t remember the last time anyone really tried for AI.”

Ysaye sat back in her chair and looked thoughtful. “That’s true; it’s been a dead issue for a long time. But I wonder, sometimes, if AI hasn’t been developing under our noses. We can store so much information now—and the computers can process it so fast.

Really, the computer
is
an intelligence of a sort now.”

“So if it ever became self-aware, it should theoretically be capable of

communicating with another intelligence?” David asked. “Well, assuming that the other intelligence can make contact with it—perhaps through a terminal.”

“True, and there is no way of telling right now that they don’t,” Ysaye admitted.

“Since we have them programmed not to respond except to a question, we have no way of knowing. Unless we could read its mind.”

David raised an eyebrow. “Have you ever tried that? I know you tested positive

for psi, just as Elizabeth and I did—and I have to tell you, since we got down here, I’m inclined to trust telepathy as often as real speech. Maybe more…”

Ysaye let out a breath she had been holding in a sigh. “I thought maybe it was

only me. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t tell the Captain, I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want people to think I was crazy. But—I didn’t bother with the

corticator. I didn’t have to. Why bother, when I could talk to Lorill Hastur and Kermiac Aldaran and Felicia without giving myself a headache and enduring the machine?”

David nodded, slowly. “Elizabeth said something similar; I’m not that—adept. I

learned the languages the hard way; I mostly get only a vague sense of what’s being said. Elizabeth says that she has had the same kind of contact with Lord Kermiac, with Felicia, and with Raymon Kadarin.”

“I can touch Kadarin sometimes,” Ysaye replied hesitantly. “But I keep away

from him.”

David was surprised; Kadarin had never been anything other than cordial with

him. “You don’t like him?”

Ysaye hesitated again. “That’s not entirely true,” she said carefully, after a

moment. “I don’t dislike him. What’s there to dislike? He’s very amiable. He’s never said or done anything out of line. But I’m a little afraid of him. I don’t have the feeling that he’s a good man, if that makes any sense.”

David had felt himself becoming more and more closely attuned to Ysaye as they

talked, and now he sensed what Ysaye would not say aloud—that for most of her life she’d had a sixth sense about some men, those who would seek her out as an exotic. And he thought that she had sensed something of that sort of behavior in Kadarin. And as if she were uncomfortable even with thinking about him, she changed the subject.

“Have you seen Felicia’s baby?” she asked abruptly.

The baby had been the source of quiet speculation ever since it had been born a

week ago. No one, to David’s knowledge, had seen it yet.

“I haven’t,” he replied. Then, curiously, “It
is
Aldaran’s child, isn’t it? I gathered that happens often enough here—is she some kind of secondary wife or something? No one seems to be making much of a fuss over it, except that it seems to be a good thing that the baby was born healthy.”

“I can tell you that Felicia and Aldaran aren’t married in any form at all,” Ysaye said dryly. “Apparently it isn’t considered any kind of a disgrace here to be the acknowledged mistress of a prominent man. The disgrace comes only if no man can own to being the father of a child.”

There was more underlying Ysaye’s words; again, David caught the sense of what

she didn’t say. That she thought Aldaran should be ashamed of himself for being such a womanizer, rather than being proud of his conquests—and pitied Felicia, for being a kind of willing accomplice—or victim—to Kermiac’s wishes.

“Maybe you hadn’t heard,” Ysaye continued. “It seems that we’re all invited to

the naming ceremony for the baby, at their Midwinter Festival—that’s very nearly our Christmas Day.”

“Well, is it a boy or a girl?” David asked. “Do you think they have pink gifts and blue gifts around here?”

He had meant it as a joke, to lighten Ysaye’s mood, but she took it seriously. “I’m not sure, and there are some rumors that perhaps it’s something else.”

“Something other than a boy or a girl?” David felt his eyebrows climbing. “Hmm.

Well, that
does
happen sometimes on Earth, too, but not very often. Fortunately. And it’s usually correctable to a degree by surgery. Well, if we come to feel it’s appropriate, we could make delicate inquiries in that direction when the time comes. Surely Aurora is qualified to do the operation. Or do you think they’d resent our intrusion? Rather hard on the child, if it’s an—well,
it.”

“I don’t quite know how to describe it.” Ysaye said, with a puzzled frown. “There seems to be the feeling that it’s another
normal
option here, and it’s not considered to be all that unfortunate. They call it
emmasca,
and I gather it’s both—and neither.”

She had to know as well as he did what the roots of that word were, so David

didn’t bother to make the obvious comments.

“I gather that these
emmasca
are rather rare and they’re considered fortunate.

They’re very long-lived, for one thing. One of their kings—a Hastur king, Lorill told me

—was one. Most of them are sterile, though.” She shrugged. “Lorill tried to explain something very complicated involving genetics and the
emmasca
to me, and I didn’t get most of it. Apparently his family were up to their eyebrows way back, in trying to manipulate their bloodlines to fix certain traits, and
they
ended up with a fair number of
emmasca.
At any rate, Felicia’s child may be
emmasca.
And I gather that
that
has something to do with Aldaran’s genetic heritage, which, believe it or not, is supposed to have even stranger things in it than Felicia’s does.”