The Night's Dawn Trilogy (15 page)

Her name was Ruth Hilton, she told him briskly, and her daughter was Jay. There was no mention of a husband or boyfriend.
The three of them started walking down the road together.

“It’s nice to see someone was thinking along practical lines,” Horst said. “A fine band of pioneers we turned out to be.”
Ruth was also dressed for the heat, with shorts, cloth hat, and a sleeveless vest; her boots were larger versions of Jay’s.
She was carrying a well-loaded rucksack; and her broad leather belt had several devices clipped on to it. Horst didn’t recognize
any of them.

“This is a tropical planet, Father. Didn’t the Church give you a generalist didactic memory of Lalonde before you left?” Ruth
asked.

“Yes. But I hardly expected to be undertaking a route march the minute we arrived. By my personal timetable, it’s only been
fifteen hours since I left the arcology abbey.”

“This is a stage one colony,” Ruth said, without any sympathy. “You think they’re going to have the time or the inclination
to wet-nurse five thousand arcology dwellers who have never seen the open sky before? Do me a favour!”

“I still think we might have been given some warning. Perhaps a chance to change into more appropriate clothing.”

“You should have carried it with you in the zero-tau pod. That’s what I did. There’s an allowance for up to twenty kilos of
personal luggage in the passage contract.”

“The Church paid for my passage.” Horst answered carefully. He could see Ruth had what it took to survive in this new, demanding
world; but she would have to learn to soften her somewhat mercenary attitude or he could imagine himself trying to calm a
lynch mob. He forbade a grin. Now that would be a true test of my ability.

“Know what your problem is, Father?” Ruth asked. “Too much faith.”

Quite the contrary, Horst thought, I have nowhere near enough. Which is why I’m here in the remotest part of the human dominion,
where I can do little or no harm. Though the bishop was far too kind to put it like that.

“What do you intend doing when we reach our destination?” he asked. “Farming? Fishing in the Juliffe, perhaps?”

“Not likely! We’ll be self-sufficient, of course, I brought enough seeds for that. But I’m a qualified didactic assessor.”
She grinned roguishly. “I’m going to be the village school-marm. Probably the county schoolmarm, seeing the scraploose way
this place is put together. I’ve got a laser imprinter and every educational course you can think of stored in here.” She
patted the rucksack. “Jay and I are going to be able to write our own ticket with that. You wouldn’t believe the things you’re
going to need to know once we’re dumped in the middle of nowhere.”

“I expect you’re right,” he said without much enthusiasm. Were all the other colonists experiencing the subtle feeling of
doubt now they were facing the daunting physical reality of Lalonde? He looked round at the people nearest to him.

They were all plodding along lethargically. A gorgeous teenage girl trudged past, face down, lips set in grim misery. Her
jump suit top was tied round her waist; she was wearing a tangerine scoop-neck T-shirt underneath, revealing plenty of smooth
skin that was coated in sweat and dust. A silent martyr, Horst decided; he had seen the type often enough when he put in a
stint at his arcology’s refuge. None of the males nearby paid her the slightest attention.

“You bet I am,” Ruth boomed irrepressibly. “Take shoes, now. You probably brought two or three pairs, right?”

“Two pairs of boots, yes.”

“Smart. But they’re not going to last five years in the jungle, no matter what fancy composite they’re made out of. After
that you make your own. And for that you come to me for a course in cobbling.”

“I see. You have thought this out, haven’t you?”

“Wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.”

Jay smiled up at her mother with complete adoration.

“Isn’t an imprinter rather heavy to be lugging about?” Horst asked curiously.

Ruth guffawed loudly, and ran the back of her hand across her brow in a theatrical motion. “Sure is. But it’s valuable, especially
the newest technical courses, stuff this planet’s never heard of. I’m not about to leave that in the hands of the spaceport
crew. No way, no how.”

A chill of alarm slithered through Horst. “You don’t think…”

“I’m bloody sure they are. It’s what I’d do.”

“Why didn’t you say something back there?” he demanded in exasperation. “I have reading primer books in my container, medicines,
communion wine. Some of us could have remained with it for security.”

“Listen, Father, I’m not aiming to be mayor of this group, I’ll leave that to some hulking macho male, thank you. And I can’t
see myself being applauded for standing up in front of that manager woman and saying we should stay behind to stop her friends
from stealing our gear. Would you have done that, you with your goodwill to all men?”

“Not publicly, no,” Horst said. “But there are ways.”

“Well, start thinking of them, because those precious containers of ours are going to be left piled up in a warehouse in town
for the next couple of days before we set sail. And we’re going to need what’s inside them, and I really do mean
need
; because anyone who thinks that all it takes to survive out there is determination and honest toil is in for the shock of
their pampered lives.”

“Do you always have to be right about absolutely everything?”

“Listen, you’re here to look after our souls, Father. You’ll be good at that, I can see, you’re the caring type. Deep down,
anyway. But keeping my soul connected to my body, that’s all down to me. And I intend to do the best job I can.”

“All right,” he said. “It might be a good idea for me to speak with some of our group this evening. Perhaps we could organize
some kind of watch at the warehouse.”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea to see if we can acquire replacements for anything that’s gone walkabout, as well. There’s bound to
be other groups’ gear stored with ours, it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“Alternatively, we could go to the Sheriff’s office, and ask them to find anything that’s been stolen from us,” Horst said
forcibly.

Ruth laughed out loud.

They walked on in silence for several minutes.

“Ruth?” he asked eventually. “Why have you come here?”

She exchanged a mournful glance with Jay, the two of them suddenly vulnerable. “I’m running away,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

Durringham had been founded in 2582, a couple of (Earth) years after the Confederation inspection team had confirmed the results
of the land venture company’s ecological analysis crew, agreeing that Lalonde had no biota exceptionally hazardous to humans—a
certificate which was vital for any planet seeking to attract colonists. The hiatus was due to the venture company (which
had bought the settlement rights from the scoutship which discovered the planet) attracting partners, and turning itself into
the Lalonde Development Company. With enough financial backing to establish a

working spaceport and provide a minimal level of civil administration, as well as securing an agreement with the Edenists
to germinate a bitek habitat above Murora, the system’s largest gas giant, the task of attracting colonists began in earnest.

After reviewing the predominantly South-East Asian catchment profiles and intended culture-base of other stage one colony
planets in the same sector as Lalonde, the LDC board decided to concentrate on EuroChristian-ethnic stock to give themselves
an adequate immigrant pool. They wrote a broadly democratic constitution which would come into effect over a century, with
the LDC turning over local civil administration functions to elected councils, and ultimately the governorship to a congress
and president at the end of the first hundred years. Theory had it that when the process was complete Lalonde would have developed
a burgeoning industrial/technological society, with the LDC as the largest across-the-board shareholder in the planet’s commercial
enterprises. That was when the real profits would start to roll in.

At the start of the preliminary stage, cargo starships delivered thirty-five dumpers into low orbit: squat, conical, atmospheric-entry
craft, packed full of heavy machinery, supplies, fuel, ground vehicles, and the prefabricated sections of runway. The dumpers
were aerobraked below orbital velocity, and one by one began their long fiery descent curve towards the jungle below. They
rode the beacon signals down to land beside the Juliffe’s southern bank, spread out in a line fifteen kilometres long.

Each dumper was thirty metres high, fifteen metres across its base, weighing three hundred and fifty tonnes fully loaded.
Small fins around the base steered them with reasonable accuracy through the atmosphere until they were seven hundred metres
above the ground, by which time they had slowed to subsonic speed. A cluster of eight giant parachutes lowered them for the
final few hundred metres, bringing them to a landing which resembled a controlled crash to the small flight-control team watching
from a safe distance. They were designed for a one-way trip; where they landed, they stayed.

Construction crews followed them down in small VTOL spaceplanes, and began unloading. When the dumpers had been emptied they
formed environment-proof accommodation for the crews’ families and offices for the governor’s civil administration staff.

The jungle surrounding the dumpers was levelled first, a chop and burn policy producing a wide swath of desolated foliage
and charred animals; the spaceport clearing followed. After the runway grids were assembled, a second wave of workers arrived
in the McBoeings, along with more equipment. This time they had to build their own accommodation, using the profusion of logs
the earlier crews had left scattered across the ground. Rings of crude wooden cabins sprang up around all of the dumpers,
looking as if they were rafts floating on a sea of mud. Stripped of its scrub cover, subject to continual heavy plant traffic
and Lalonde’s daily rains, the rich black loam was reduced to a fetid-smelling sludge which was over half a metre thick in
places. The rock crushers worked continuously throughout the planet’s twenty-six-hour day, but they could never supply enough
chippings to stabilize the expanding city’s quagmire roads.

The view from the scuffed and algae-splattered window of Ralph Hiltch’s office, on the third floor of the dumper which housed
the Kulu Embassy, showed him the sun-soaked timber-plank roofs of Durringham spread out across the gently undulating land
next to the river. The conglomeration was devoid of any methodical street pattern. Durring-ham hadn’t been laid down with
logical forethought, it had erupted like a tumour. He was sure even Earth’s eighteenth-century cities had more charm than
this. Lalonde was his fourth offworld assignment, and he had never seen anything more primitive. The weather-stained hulls
of the dumpers rose above the shanty-town precincts like arcane temples, linked to the ramshackle buildings with a monstrous
spider web of sable-black power cables slung between tall poles. The dumpers’ integral fusion generators provided ninety per
cent of the planet’s electrical power, and Durringham was completely dependent on their output.

By virtue of the Royal Kulu Bank taking a two per cent stake in the LDC, Kulu’s Foreign Office had acquired the

dumper for its staff as soon as the start-up phase of colonization was over, ousting the Governor’s Aboriginal Fruit Classification
Division in the process. Ralph Hiltch was grateful for the political arm-twisting manoeuvre of twenty years ago; it allowed
him to claim an air-conditioned office, and a tiny two-room apartment next door. As the Commercial AttachÉ he was entitled
to a bigger apartment in the embassy’s residential block outside, but his actual position as Head of Station for the Kulu
External Security Agency operation on Lalonde meant he needed the kind of secure quarters which the old dumper with its carbotanium
structure could provide. Besides, like everything else in Durringham, the residential block was made of wood, and leaked something
rotten.

He watched the near-solid cliff of silver-grey rain sweeping in from the ocean, obscuring the narrow verdant line peeping
above the rooftops to the south which marked the boundary of the jungle. It was the third downpour of the day. One of the
five screens on the wall opposite his desk showed a real-time weather-satellite image of Amarisk and the ocean to the west,
both covered by spiral arms of cloud. To his wearily experienced eye the rain would last for a good hour and a half.

Ralph eased himself back in his chair and regarded the man sitting nervously on the other side of his desk. Maki Gruter tried
not to shift about under the stare. He was a twenty-eight-year-old grade three manager working for the Governor’s Transport
Office, dressed in fawn shorts and a jade shirt, his lemon-yellow cagoule hanging off the back of his chair. Like almost everyone
else in Lalonde’s civil administration he was for sale; they universally regarded this backwoods posting as an opportunity
to rip off both the LDC and the colonists. Ralph had recruited Maki Gruter two and a half years ago, a month after he himself
had arrived. It wasn’t so much an entrapment exercise as simply making a selection from a host of eager volunteers. There
were times, Ralph reflected sagely, when he would like to see an official who wouldn’t sell out for just a sniff of the ubiquitous
Edenist fuseodollar. Once his duty tour on Lalonde was finished in another three years he would have to go through innumerable
refresher courses. Subversion was so easy here.

In fact there were times when he questioned the whole point of the ESA mounting an operation on what was basically a jungle
populated by psychological Neanderthals. But Lalonde was only twenty-two light-years from the Principality of Ombey, the Kulu
Kingdom’s newest dominion star system, itself only just out of stage-two development. The ruling Saldana dynasty wanted to
make sure that Lalonde didn’t mature along hostile lines. Ralph and his colleagues were assigned to watch the colony’s political
evolution, occasionally offering covert assistance to aspirants with coincident policies; money, or black data on opposing
candidates, it didn’t make any difference in the end. The formative years of a colony’s independence set the political agenda
for centuries to come, so the ESA did its best to make sure the first elected leaders were ideologically benign as regards
the Kingdom. Placemen, basically.