As they had retraced their steps up the valley, then, they had spied sentinels, perched in places that were meant to be conspicuous, atop boulders and rubble mounds flanking the streambed, leaning on lances whose steel heads gleamed softly in the blue-gray light sifting down out of the overcast sky. Others carried strange-looking contraptions of cables, pulleys, and bent steel, which Beled identified as powerful bows. From this distance it was difficult to say much about their appearance. More than a few were redheads; the men tended to be bearded; they wore clothing that in some cases was out-and-out camouflage, in others was just meant to blend in with natural backgrounds.
When they had passed between the first pair of sentries, Beled, on point, had held up his hand, signaling that they should stop. The obvious concern had been that by going any farther they would begin placing these people to their rear, effectively allowing themselves to be surrounded. But the sentries, apparently understanding this, now began to move up the slope abreast of them, leaving them a clear exit.
Or at least a clear pedestrian exit. By the time the Seven and their young guide came in view of the totem raised above the glider, it had been surrounded by perhaps two dozen Diggers. They had pulled all the equipment cases out of the cargo hatch, laid them out on the ground in neat rows, and begun going through their contents. Some of them were making lists of what they found, taking inventory of what they seemingly thought of as their new property.
“I take it you have never seen or heard of such people, Einstein,” Doc said.
“Rumors. But not this many. We just thought they were strays from other RIZes.”
“Well, as you can see, they are something else,” Doc said. He raised his voice slightly, addressing the whole group. “Now that we’ve had some time for the shock to wear off, I think you all understand what we are looking at. These people are not descendants of the Seven Eves. They are rootstock. Their ancestors survived the Hard Rain and somehow found a way to live belowground until quite recently. Most likely they are cousins of yours, Tyuratam Lake.”
It took Ty a few moments to understand that Doc was alluding to events five thousand years in the past. “By way of Rufus MacQuarie?” he said.
Doc blinked in assent. “Dinah’s father, as is well documented in the Epic, went belowground with some like-minded persons. Efforts have been made, during the last century, to find their underground home and learn what became of them. All unavailing.”
“Perhaps they didn’t wish to be found,” Ty said.
“How long have you known of this?” Ariane asked.
“How long have you known of it, Ariane?” Doc returned. “Did the unusual orders you were given not fill you with a certain amount of curiosity?”
“Of course! But I never—”
“Many of us have wondered, have speculated. The first solid evidence that I know of emerged about a year ago. Prior to that there were rumors, as Einstein says, but they could be more easily explained by supposing that some renegade Sooners were running around in the boondocks, living as they pleased. Or that they were forward scouts sent by Red to probe Blue territory. Indeed, Survey found examples of both.” Doc’s eyes strayed toward Beled, who met his gaze. “Red has made surprisingly deep incursions into central Asia, for example. Lieutenant Tomov may bear witness to that, if you can draw him out on the subject. Like many who have fought, he finds it tiresome to converse with ones who haven’t.”
“So you have been engaged in a systematic investigation for at least a year” was the only thing about all of that that Ariane seemed to find interesting.
“As have you, Ariane. It is just that you didn’t know it until now. I myself was not really sure until—” Doc looked over at Memmie, who had taken custody of the shovel handle and fallen into the habit of employing it as a walking staff. Doc got a faintly mischievous look on his face. “Until I held in my hands the Stick of Srap Tasmaner.”
“How much do we know about them?” Langobard asked.
“As of this moment,” Doc said, “the eight of us know a hundred times as much about these people as all other Spacers put together.”
“Spacers?”
Again the mischievous look. “In our discussions—our entirely hypothetical discussions—we found ourselves needing some term that we could use to denote the descendants of the Seven Eves—the inhabitants of the ring—as opposed to people like this. We settled on Spacers.”
“That makes it sound even more like all of this was foreordained,” Ariane said.
Her reproachful tone was getting on all of their nerves. Nonetheless they were surprised when it was Remembrance who said something. Perhaps the Camite felt emboldened by possession of a stick large enough to give the Julian a sound whack or two. More likely she was offended by Ariane’s accusatory tone, which hinted that Doc had been less than honest. Planting the Srap Tasmaner for balance on the uneven ground and turning to face Ariane, she said: “Of note here is that we are making first contact with a race of cousins hidden from us for five millennia. Some would find that remarkable.”
“And I do, Memmie!” Ariane said, after a few moments spent recovering from her shock at being spoken to this way by a Camite. “But in order to handle the situation well I think we need to know the larger context.”
“Any well-informed Spacer knows the context,” Memmie returned, sweeping her free hand up across the sky. “It is only a certain type of mind that scorns what is known by all and treats secrets as jewels.”
After this Ariane seemed to feel that further conversation would not be to her advantage. It was only the ten millionth such conversation that had taken place during the long, fraught, weirdly personal relationship between Julians and Camites, so Ariane knew her cue to shut up and look aggrieved.
There had been very little discussion, as yet, of the possibility of violence. Body language and shared glances among Ty, Bard, and Beled suggested that they had all been thinking about it. Einstein did them the favor of blurting it out: “What do you guys think? Can we take ’em?”
“Yes” was the answer from all three.
“But archery is a concern,” Ty added.
“A factor is how much they know about us and our armaments. Have they been scouting us for years?”
Beled aimed the question at Doc, as if he would somehow know. The look on Ariane’s face was something like See, I knew it! but Doc merely looked amused. “If so,” Doc said, “they have rarely if ever seen us use our weapons, and so they are unlikely to know how those work.”
“Well, they have taken all of our buckies offline,” Beled remarked, with another glance at the screen on his wrist.
“They appear to have retained some knowledge of how technology works,” Doc pointed out. “Even if they don’t have the ability to manufacture their own buckies, they can recognize them for what they are. So of course they would disable those.”
“It is a hostile act,” Beled muttered.
“If we let their archers come within range,” Ty pointed out, “then they will have us. We should consider that a hostile act.”
“Then we should not go much farther,” Bard said.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Ty replied.
They had approached now to within about a hundred meters of the glider and had the full attention of the Diggers surrounding it. Four of them had claimed the high places around it, where buckies had been stationed earlier, and two more had clambered up onto the tops of the wings. The strangely orderly looters had ceased their activities and pressed forward to see what was going to happen. At least three of them were children, and there were as many women as men.
“Mixed messages,” Bard said, and made a gesture that caused his fellow Spacers to stop where they were.