The Mystery of Ireta (27 page)

“Varian?” He leaned over, touching her shoulder and smiling at the effort she made to unglue her eyes. An old tale popped into his head and, so prompted, he kissed her cool lips gently.

“Kkkkaaaaaiiiiii?” Her eyes opened fully and then the lids drooped back but the left corner of her mouth lifted in appreciation.

“Just relax, Varian. You’ll be in working order shortly.”

“Hhhhooooowww?” The word trembled out as an aspirated whisper.

“Tor came. Don’t ask more questions, dear heart. Give the reviver a chance to penetrate. I’m right here. Everything is unchanged!”

“Nnughhh!” The groan came from her belly and made Kai laugh at the disgust vibrant in her protest.

“Well, a Thek bestirred itself on our behalf. It’s got a full report. I taped it,” he explained quickly as he saw Varian’s astonishment. “It is apparently thinking my words over.” Kai gestured to the silent rock. “Don’t move yet,” he cautioned Varian as he saw her neck tendons strain against the long immobility. “I guess I can give you the stimulants now, but don’t bounce. Oh, and your shoulder’s healed,” he added as he gave her the second set of shots. Paskutti had shattered Varian’s left shoulder just before Tardma had snapped his wrist.

Varian’s fully functional eyebrows registered pleased amazement, immediately followed by a frown of thoughtful concern.

“No, I don’t know how long we’ve slept, Varian. Paskutti damaged the shuttle’s chronometer. It’s just above the comunit, remember.”

Varian rolled her eyes in frustration and began to clear her throat.

“Make haste slowly,” he cautioned her, hand on her shoulder. “Or should I revive Lunzie? . . .”

Varian shook her head, working her tongue around her mouth as the tissues began to moisten. “Leaders first . . . and last . . .” Her voice sounded as disused as his had, and he repressed a smile.

“If your fingers and toes are beginning to tingle, try the small-muscle exercises of Discipline. They’ll help circulation and toning.”

Varian took a deep breath and closed her eyes to concentrate.

“I don’t know what Tor’s contemplating, Varian,” Kai went on, “but it can’t repair the comunit. It doesn’t indicate whether it received our message or realized we weren’t communicating on schedule. The
ARCT-10
hasn’t been in touch, but Tor doesn’t appear concerned. I can’t tell whether that’s due to normal Thek indifference or not.” Then Kai laughed. “There’s been no contact with the Ryxi.”

Varian’s chuckle sounded completely normal, and he grinned down at her. Her eyes were twinkling with laughter.

“In old tapes,” she said, chewing her words out of her mouth slowly, “on my planet, Sleeping Beauty is wakened by a noble’s kiss after a hundred years. Sweet way to wake up.”

She raised her hand and touched his mouth with her fingers.

“And I’d give anything to know if it was a hundred years!” Kai replied, taking her fingers in his hand and kissing them in what he considered an appropriate fashion. He continued to hold onto her hand as a thought came to him. “We might have one quick way of finding out. Step out of this cave and let the golden fliers have a good look at us. If the giffs react, we can’t have slept that long.”

“Don’t know the life span of giffs.”

Kai shot a glance at the quiescent Thek. “I experience an earnest desire to be recognized by something that remembers
me
,” and he prodded his chest with a fist, “besides that rock!”

“Hundred years’d mean no mutineers on watch.”

“Point well taken. Even the freshest of their power packs wouldn’t last more than two years. I’d also guess they’d stay at that secondary camp since they’d already stocked it last rest day . . .”

“Last rest day?” Varian regarded him with an amusement tinged with disbelief. “How long ago
was
last rest day?”

“Subjective or objective time elapsed?” he asked in reply and grinned to take the sting out of the notion.

“Good question.” Varian could enunciate more clearly now. She began to flex her arms and knees. “Hey, my shoulder knit perfectly!” She rose, muttering under her breath as her rebelling muscles made the effort graceless. “Things seem to be all in working order,” she added as she headed for the toilet.

While she was gone, Kai stared at Tor. Then he walked around the Thek, looking for the recorder. Irreverently he wondered if the Thek was sitting on it, had ingested it, or perhaps created a heat-resistant pouch in which it could keep bits and pieces of fragile alien manufacture.

“It’s going to stay like that for days,” Varian said in disgust as she joined Kai. “C’mon. I want to see what’s been happening outside. And I want something to drink to take the dust out of my mouth—and to put some unprocessed food in my poor shrunken stomach.”

She gave him a malicious wink, knowing that the ship-bred Kai never noticed the aftertaste of processed food as she invariably did.

They opened the exit iris of the shuttle just enough to squeeze through without diluting the cold-sleep gas significantly. But the atmosphere outside the space shuttle was like a hot smack in the face with a moist stinking cloth.

Varian let out a surprised grunt, then began to inhale deeply to adjust to the shocking change of temperature. At first Kai thought they must have emerged during the planet’s night but, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he realized that the opening of the cave was covered with thick green foliage. There was a break where the Thek had pushed its vehicle through. The cone-shaped carrier was resting a few meters from the shuttle’s entrance.

“Where are the power units?” Varian called as the two were drawn to examine the strange craft. “It’s the same shape Tor is, only larger.” She gestured with her hands in surprise, then reached out to touch the dull metal of the rounded stern. She pulled her hand back. “Wow, heat’s radiating from it.”

Kai was at the bow of the Thek vehicle, inspecting the scored heavy plasshield which was half-open on its pivots. He looked inside, trying to deduce the purpose of various odd protuberances and cavities on the metallic rim of the nose section.

“Only a Thek could pilot the damned thing with a nearly blind shield!” She turned away, indifferent to the mysteries of Thek navigation. “Now these,” she said, catching a vine and testing its strength by hanging her weight from it, feet off the floor, “are enough to feed us for weeks if that’s all we want.”

Before Kai could stop her, Varian took a running start and, holding tightly to the vine, swung out beyond the cave mouth.

“Wheeeee!”

“Varian!” Kai rushed forward, catching her on the swing back, holding tightly to her hips. He’d a moment’s horrific vision of the vine’s parting, dropping her into the sea, meters below, to certain death.

“Sorry, Kai,” she said in a tone that wasn’t apologetic. “I couldn’t resist the urge. Used to do a lot of vine-swinging as a kid on Fomalhaut.” Then she relented as she realized her exuberance had scared him. “Irresponsible behavior when I’m not quite fit but—” and she grinned at him mischievously “—there’s something about contact with a Thek which makes me behave . . .”

“Childish?” Kai’s panic had subsided, and he realized that he, too, had overreacted.

“Yes, childish. Say, have you ever seen a Thek child, young, cub, pup, fledgling . . . or maybe you’d call it a pebble?”

Varian’s laughter was contagious at any time and, despite his frustrations and worries, Kai laughed too, hugging her to him in wordless appreciation of her ability to find any amusement in their circumstances.

“There! That’s better, Kai,” she said, rubbing her nose against his. “I equate Thek with gloom and doom.” Abruptly she released herself and grabbed a vine. “You know, there’s something odd about such vines’ growing on a giff’s cliff. You don’t suppose our presence here . . .”

In another abrupt movement, Varian held onto the vine and leaned out of the cave mouth, peering up at the sky and to her right.

“No, there’s still giffs above us,” she said, swinging in again. She allowed the momentum of the vine to carry her back out, looking to the left this time. “But this is the only cliff covered in vines. I’m sure it was barren rock when we wedged the shuttle in here.” She made a third excursion, grinning as she released the vine on its inward sway, and landed back at his side. “A fruit-bearing vine, too.” She reached down to her boot and whistled in shrill triumph, removing the slim blade lodged there. “Too frail, like us, to pierce a heavyworlder’s hide, but, praise Krim, they left ’em for us. I’m going to cut us juicy, fresh fruit for breakfast. Or whatever meal it is.”

Before Kai could protest, she had put the knife between her teeth and was pulling herself up a vine, out of sight. He was testing the strength of another thick tendril when her cheerful voice advised him to look up. Instinctively he caught the object launched at him.

“Here comes another. And it’s dead ripe so don’t squeeze hard.”

“Varian—” His fingers did exert too much pressure on the melon and the succulent sweet odor made his mouth water.

“I could eat these all by myself, Kai, so here’s another one for you.” Varian dropped to the cave floor.

“We shouldn’t eat too much at first,” Kai said. He sank down beside her as she sliced a segment off and offered it to him on her knife point.

“Quite likely,” she said, slicing a second piece, for herself. She murmured with delight as she bit the soft green fruit. “Go ahead. Eat!” she urged, juice dribbling from the corners of her mouth.

“The things I do for the EEC,” Kai said, pretending horror at having to eat unprocessed food. As the first sweetness dissolved in his dry mouth, Kai was willing to admit, privately, that natural food was undeniably juicier than processed.

They both ate slowly, chewing thoroughly.

“I suspect root vegetables would have been wiser in terms of protein content, but fruit sugar raises blood levels,” Varian remarked thoughtfully. “Oh, but this is good. What I don’t understand,” she went on gesturing with her half-eaten slice, “is how those vines grew here. Granted,” and she raised the slice to forestall Kai, “we don’t know how long we’ve slept, and growth on Ireta is explosive. But the other cliffs are still clear. The giffs’ main diet is fish and Rift grass. These vines aren’t from the Rift, and this section of cliff looks more like forest than palisade. The vines grow right down to the water.”

“Strangely selective, I agree. Did you see much of the giffs on your swings?”

“Some, circling high. I don’t think they saw me if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s early morningish—hazy, overcast. Couldn’t see their food place from this angle, but I’d guess that the morning fishers are about their labors.”

“We will wait,” said Kai with careful authority, “until they have fed before we put in an appearance.”

“Ah, you remember my lecture about disturbing feeding animals!”

“Not that much subjective time has passed, Varian!”

He grinned as she automatically twisted her wrist to glance at her unregistering chronometer.

“Lifetime batteries, huh?” she said in disgust.

Varian’s eyes flicked toward the dim bulk of the shuttle. “Should we wake Lunzie or Triv?”

“I see no reason to until Tor has come to some conclusions.”

“Or favors us with an accurate reading of elapsed time.
That’s
what I’d like to know!” Varian was almost angry. “Why, if it weren’t for the vines over the cave and the dead batteries we could just have overslept.” A shudder seized her shoulders and shook her slender frame.

“The notion is leveling, isn’t it,” Kai said, understanding her mood perfectly. “The universe has gone by without noticing that we have faltered.”

Even to himself he sounded as pompous as Gaber, and he quickly took a bit of melon to hide his embarrassment.

“Yes, that grits at me,” she said. “We have such a brief time”—she gestured to the shuttle, and the brooding Thek inside—“in which to make a mark of any sort, to achieve some merit. I know I want to leave some sign that I tried! Krim
erase
those misguided, misbegotten, mutineers.”

“I’d hate to think we were the sign of their achievement!”

Varian jumped to her feet and launched the rind of melon past the vine screen. They heard a faint
plop
as it hit the water below. “No, by Krim! We’ll have something of our own to report out of this mess, and I don’t care how long we have to sleep to do it. Some EEC vessel is going to strip that beacon. And when it does, it’ll come streaming into orbit to tap Ireta’s wealth! And I’ll be here!”

2

T
HEY
did not wish to dilute the sleep mist by unnecessary trips into the shuttle or to disturb the Thek until it was ready to communicate. So they settled themselves near the entrance to the cave. One of the short hard showers which dominated Ireta’s tropical weather sent the vines rattling and twisting into the cave.

“You know something, Kai?” said Varian after a long companionable silence. “I can smell that wind.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, I don’t smell Ireta any longer. I smell other things, like rotting fish and decaying fruit and something else that smells worse than Ireta used to when we first landed.”

Kai inhaled tentatively. “You’re right!”

Neither of them was enthusiastic since the basic odor of Ireta was hydrotelluride. They had once had nose filters to neutralize the smell.

“I suppose,” Varian said resignedly, “that it’s better to get accustomed to the overriding stench of a place so you can smell other things, but somehow . . .”

“I know. Anything but hydrotelluride. On the positive side, Lunzie did say that one’s olfactory sense can be . . .” Kai hunted for the appropriate word.

“Reconditioned.” Absentmindedly Varian suggested a word, but she was already bent forward, toward the cave opening, sniffing deeply. Then she turned, sniffed again toward the interior. “Part of the new stink comes from the Thek’s craft. What does it use for power?”

“My father told me that for short distances the Thek uses its own energy.”

“Short distances? Like intersystem travel?”

Kai chuckled. “All things are relative. Thek, so they tell us, are a form of granite with a nuclear core for energy. That’s how they make pseudopods. They keep a reservoir of liquid silicon which they move hydraulically to form extremities. Thek can move with extraordinary speed if they’re charged up. The astrophysics officer on the
ARCT
told me that he’d heard from a reliable source that Thek like to sit on radioactive granite—which we’ll probably find on Ireta if we ever get equipment again—Thek absorb energy that way.”