And have someone bring more beshti up from the Refuge to Alihinan, clear up on the Plateau, on the other side of the Needle. “Which will take a while. If the Wall has cracked, the spine itself may grow unstable, and we have a man lying in camp with a broken leg.” His beshta’s descending strides jolted under him, a chancy descent of a loose, sandy slope. “We stand a better chance by catching our runaways.” As haze wrapped them about, obscuring all but the solid shapes of the sandstone spires. “Has the Wall shown a breach?”
“Not yet.”
“Then tell me when it does.”
“Omi, when it comes, where it comes, they think now it may become a far faster, far wider breach. An entire section of the Wall may fail at once. The displacement in that first event may have been as much as ten meters.”
Drusus’s usual stolid, quiet voice was not stolid or happy at the moment. A cataclysm of icy water was portended to break through, not far to the south, but right where they might have been standing, if they had been a number of days further advanced on their trek. They would have been camped on the Halfmoon section of the Wall, setting up their relay when it changed relative elevation by ten meters.
Maybe there was reason the director had moved Drusus up in the daily sequence.
“Ian says he is this very moment preparing a rocket,”Drusus said, “to soft-land a relay at Halfmoon. You have no need to go on.”
Ian had hadto relay that to him. They had disputed the matter of the rocket hotly before he left, he and Ian, Ian intent on using their sole prepared rocket to set down the relay, before establishing fuel dumps and small manned way stations to take various missions there by truck, a very quick process on one end and a very slow business of establishing a land route on the other, a three-year program with trucks making successively more distant fuel drops, and getting to the Wall eventually. Machines had to be supported by more and more machines. Sand buried fuel dumps. Fine dust found its way into intakes and engines. Landbound machines broke down. Flying ones crashed in inconvenient places and someone, usually with beshti, had to trek after their irreplaceable metals. Marak maintained he didn’t need three years to prepare the way for a small, self-sustaining caravan. He could get a firsthand look at the Southern Wall while Ian was still getting under way, and without risk of an airplane or expending another rocket in a very chancy and rocky area.
He would have been right—if he hadn’t lost the beshti. If he’d used Ian’s metal-centered cable to secure the beshti, instead of softer, safer rope.
If, if, and if.
He hated it when Ian was right. He could limp home with the two beshti they had and all his party could survive with limited canvas. He could give Meziq the makers, set the leg, and have it healed before they got down off the spine.
But they weren’t that far from their fugitives, and they weren’t beaten yet.
“Ian is urging us to take the conservative course and walk home, and perhaps, eventually, someone will meet us with beshti,” he said to Hati, their two beshti side by side for the moment. “He says the Wall will crack at Halfmoon.”
Hati shrugged. “So Carina says.” Naming her own watcher. “Ian is launching his rocket. Likely we shall still set up our other relay ourselves, after Ian’s silly rocket sits down on a rock, like the last one. Several caravans can carry back its metal, if it survives the flood.”
“They want us to go back upland and give up this chase.”
Hati looked across at him, with those beautiful fierce eyes.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
THE GOVERNOR’S OFFICE was entirely terra incognita. Procyon walked a corridor where he had never in his life looked to go, a hall lined with doors reputed to be antiques salvaged from ancient governors’ offices on prior Concord stations. They were carved in flourishes, and might even be real wood, not plastic. The vases in the niches were definitely imports, maybe antiquities, too, the sort of objets d’art that even his mother wouldn’t put flowers in. The reds and blues were deeply glazed, the gilt amazingly bright. He tried not to look impressed.
Glass doors protected the end of the corridor, clear and thick, and probably able to go opaque at the touch of a button. They said, in lettering that hung glowing with an iridescent water-pattern in the glass, SETHA T. REAUX, GOVERNOR OF CONCORD.
Those doors admitted him without his doing a thing but approach them. A second set of doors, also antique, let him into an inner office where a thirtyish official—tall, blond man, prim sort, with close-set eyes, and nothing, absolutely nothing but a bud vase on his desk—looked him over as if he’d come to steal the silver.
“Mr. Jeremy Stafford,” the man said.
Not even Brazis called him his registry name. But he was, in fact, Jeremy Stafford Jr.
“Yes, sir. I’m supposed to see the governor. Chairman Brazis asked me to come.”
“The governor is expecting you,” the man said. “Go on in.”
The inner door slid aside for him. With the feeling he was going behind more doors than he possibly liked, farther and farther from familiar territory, he walked in, onto fancy import carpet, facing a stout, gray-haired man he’d only seen on the vid.
It was a surprisingly small office, with amazing antique furnishings. A huge life-globe. He couldn’t forbear looking at it once, and again, seeing a small movement inside. Antique printed books, in massive shelves.
Reaux rose from his desk, offering a welcome, a little nod, if not a handshake, and Procyon’s instant thought, on looking into the man’s face was, He wants help, and he really hates doing this.He gave his own little bow—you never reached for an Earther’s hand: they went into hysterics—and produced as friendly a smile as he could manage, given his situation.
“Mr. Stafford,” Reaux said. “Thank you for coming. Do sit down.”
“Yes, sir.” He sank into the opposing chair, hard, but padded. The dark brown leather under his hands might be real.
“Brazis says you’re one of his best.”
“One of his newest, sir. I hope I do my job.”
“I understand you were a Freethinker.”
God, was that the issue? “I attended a couple of meetings when I was a kid. I left. It was my idea to leave.”
“In the remote past.”
“Remote, yes, sir.”
“Six years ago.”
“I’m twenty-three, sir. Not to be argumentative, but six years is a fair number of years ago, out of twenty-three. I was sixteen, seventeen, then, and stupid.”
“I hope this particular curiosity is now satisfied.”
“I didn’t agree with their ideas. I think they’re wasting their lives.”
“Attracted by the Freethinker style, then?”
“No, sir, by the ideas, on the surface, but when I got to hear the details and the reasoning, I didn’t like what I heard. And I haven’t had anything to do with them since.”
“Sixteen. And interested in the ideas. You were remarkably precocious.”
“I was curious. But I didn’t agree with them.”
“What did they say, in particular, that you didn’t agree with?”
Shaky ground. He wished now he’d skirted this topic with more determination, but didn’t see how. “They talked about justice. But they were more interested in debating their own rules. And they cheated in their own elections. How were they going to give justice to anybody, if they cheated to get into power?” It was out of his mouth before he realized he was talking to an elected official. He wished he hadn’t said that last.
“A sensitive young man.”
“I don’t count it any credit to me for being there. They’re not what I wanted. Not what I want now. That’s completely done with.”
“You have a tremendously important position these days. One naturally, yes, does understand the curiosity of youth. The flirtation with ideas. That’s even commendable. Seeing through them, more so. But let me be very frank here. If you have any lingering acquaintance with anyone in that organization, I earnestly advise you tell…not me. I know I can’t ask you for that level of honesty. But tell your Chairman. This is extremely serious. At very least—if you even remotely know someone in that organization, don’t contact them on the street for the next four days. If I could make a request—don’t entertain or be contacted by anyone with ties in the Trend oron Blunt for the entire duration of this ship’s visit to Concord. Their monitoring may be extensive, and you wouldn’t want to give them any false impression of you.”