With the uncertainty of the earth, he elected to stay in the saddle, he and Hati, having the boys pass them up a couple of good coils of rope, enough to constitute lead ropes for the two key fugitives, the young male and the senior female of the escapees. Food, water, a small medical bundle, else, and a simple roll of good canvas, in case worse weather came through before they got back to the tent—that was the rest of the supplies they needed. They could survive without any of it, but the nights were cold with the wind sweeping in off the southern ocean, and he foresaw several nights on this trek, very possibly.
Absolute prudence, the rule in the old days, would have left one rider with the camp itself—but try to persuade Hati to stay behind, in anything less than direst circumstances? She would suggest he could stay, she who was of the tribes, blood and bone.
And would he have that? No. So there was no need going that circle.
Meziq was his worry. He rode near the boy, where he lay in pain. “Three days, Meziq. Endure three days and from a clear head, when I come back, ask me favors, if you think you must.”
On that offer, he turned his beshta away. The canvas thundered in the wind, and Hati, moving ahead of him, was already a redhazed ghost in the dust.
They rode away, tracking the fugitives easily and quickly so long as the tracks lasted in the blowing gusts, intent on overtaking the beshti on the straight and narrow of the spine.
But the tracks soon led to a slot on the south side of the ridge and vanished.
It was a long, sandy slope they had noted on the way to their camp. The tracks went down it, down toward the pans, vanishing among sandstone spires, along windswept terraces.
And the wind, in the trick of that slope, came up in their faces, a different wind, that carried the warmer air off the pans.
“Auguste?” he said.
His watcher, Auguste, had listened in silence through all this, not saying a word—usual, in Auguste. But now Auguste failed to answer him.
Perhaps the storm and tricks of the high atmosphere had made the relay uncertain. They were very near the outer range of the other relays. Once the wind sank and the boys ran up the antenna on the relay station and got the battery going, his watchers, he was sure, would all at once have a great deal to say, much of it exhortation to return to camp and wait for rescue.
But for now they were on their own. Ian and Luz could oblige them by warning of further hazards and advising them the extent of the damage…once they were back in contact. No doubt Ian already knew about the earthquake.
“The young bull thinks he is master,” Hati said. “But he is not easy about it. He knows the old bull is back here.”
Small chance that the young bull, having his prizes headed down land, out of scent and sight, would come back on his own for a fight. He followed the females, damn them, thinking he led them, and they had done what beshti would do, going toward graze and most of all, water, down to the pans, where beshti were always most comfortable. Once they smelled that warm wind, all thought of the camp would fly right out of their heads.
“We have no choice,” he said.
So they rode away down the slot, headed onto the spired terraces above the pans.
Silence in his head was a curious thing.
It felt like old times.
0910H ON A NEW DAY, and the Earth ship was now three hours at dock, all its attachments made. The Southern Cross,its name was, declared to be a research vessel. And carrying light armament.
Armament. That was uncommon. That might say something about the ship’s capabilities, but it still said nothing about its purpose here, in this most sensitive zone…inside what was, after all, ondatterritory. If its arrival at Concord, even with light weapons, was in any wise a gesture aimed at the ondat,it was sheer folly, not even to be contemplated. If it was, as history indicated, a little gesture aimed at the Outsider authority, it was still provocative of the ondat. Neither was acceptable.
Setha Reaux meant to make that point early and strenously—once he found out what the ship was up to.
Ambassador Andreas Gide held the explanation of what was going on, the only source of explanation that would reach Concord’s deck, and Setha Reaux, dressed in his immaculate best, had headed down for the main-level personnel reception area to meet him, as far as meetings could go, once the necessary connection was made. But just as he got under way, security called with an emergency advisement, informing him, to his great dismay, that Ambassador Gide had left the dock on his own, refusing all advice, and headed up in the cargo-area lift system. The exit that particular lift bank afforded would be a seventh-level public station next to the Customs administrative offices.
What in hell was Gide doing?
Reaux immediately changed his car’s destination. He was not that far from the offices in question. He reversed course and went up.
And, a little breathless from the requisite walkover from a 53rd Street station rather than try to route over the Customs Plaza, Reaux arrived, planted himself in front of the bank of lift doors at Customs Plaza, watched the levels tick off on the digital indicator of an inbound lift, and drew a deep breath as Gide’s car arrived. Intercept successful.
The lift doors opened. A chest-high ovoid vehicle trundled out. A fog of melting condensation still hung about the vehicle’s cold plastic surface, a shifting mix of violets and blues that flowed like oil on water, showing no window.
Then, astonishingly, the machine extruded a violet bubble, which quickly swelled up into a head-and-shoulders simulacrum of a middle-aged man. It had a surly, heavy-jowled face and shoulder-length hair, all shining violet and fuming with cold.
The mobile containment was no surprise. Elaborate and heavy as it was, it wasthe suit which Gide would wear continually, but the usual mode of interaction of such containments was a simple holo cube on the front. Thisunprecedented innovation, this vanity, this shape it presented to the outside world, reminded Reaux of nothing so much as the fabled Sphinx of Earth—the head and forearms of a man on the body of a beetle, a smooth, shining carapace, both sheathed in that continually shifting oil-slick plasm.
Whatever that substance was—and in his tenure on the edge of ondatspace he thought he’d seen all there was to see—it gave off cold vapor, and didn’t encourage an exploratory touch.
The head, in its light fog of condensation, looked around, and one had to wonder whether Gide, inside, actually saw his surroundings via those eyes, or whether Gide was looking at him on screens through entirely different receptors. Whatever the medium, Reaux was willing to bet that the sensors in that carapace compared very well to an Outsider’s internal augmentations, that they saw into the extremes of the spectrum, that Gide could hear a pin drop—literally—if he wanted to. And he also bet that the apparatus recorded. Oh, depend on it, that shell recorded and eventually transmitted information back to the ship.
But the lift hadn’t delivered the ambassador to his office, and the ambassador had utterly ignored the official advisements to wait on dockside, as if to assert he went where he pleased and saw what he wanted. Maybe the ambassador wantedan official embarrassment, wantedto look around, and to be able to start their relations with an official fuss about protocols.
Well, he and the lift automatics had outmaneuvered that try.
“Ambassador Gide.” A little bow, a little out of breath and trying to look serene. “I’m Governor Reaux. Welcome to Concord.”
The sphinx-face stared at him. Liquid blue ice scanned him up and down. Blue lips drew further down at the corners. “A long, unattendedride.” The ambassador wastrying to provoke an incident. And the thick Earth-ethnic accent jolted a compatriot’s memory, sowed self-doubt. “Well, well,” Gide said impatiently, “are we going to have to put up with tedious ceremonials here and now, at this late hour? Get on with them, if we must.”