“What do you propose to do with that time?” Landasher demanded. Until now, he had always struck me as a wise and reasonable leader, but this evening he was under a lot of stress.
“Learn,” Orolo said. “Learn of the Geometers, before the Sæcular Power takes this moment away from us.”
The three-wheeler reached the bottom. Sammann hopped off, unslinging his jeejah from his shoulder. He aimed its sensors at the probe. Cord gunned the engine briefly and swung the machine around so that its headlight, too, was aimed at the probe. Then she hopped off and began to pull gear from the cargo shelf on the rear axle.
“What of—how do you know it is safe? What about infection!? Orolo? Orolo!” Landasher cried, for Cord’s headlight gambit had offered a much better look at the thing, and Orolo was drifting toward it, fascinated.
“If they were afraid of being infected by us, they would not have come here,” Orolo said. “If we are at risk of being infected by them, then we are at their mercy.”
“Do you really fancy that bolting the gate is going to stop people who have helicopters?” Landasher asked.
“I have an idea about that,” Orolo said. “Fraa Erasmas will see to it.”
By the time I had got back up to the top of the ramp, Yul and Gnel had retrieved the parachute. They and a small crew of adventurous avout had wadded and stuffed much of it into the open back of Gnel’s fetch, restraining it with a haphazard web of cargo straps and shroud lines. Still, an acre of parachute and a mile of shroud lines trailed in the dust behind the fetch as they drew up to the edge of the pit.
Now at this point we ought to have put on white body suits, gloves, respirators, and sealed the alien chute in sterile poly and sent it to a lab to be examined and analyzed down to the molecular level. But I had other orders. So I grabbed the edge of the chute—my first physical contact with an artifact from another star system—and felt it. To me, no expert on textiles, it felt like the same stuff we used to make parachutes on Arbre. Same story with the shroud lines. I did not think that they were what we called newmatter.
Quite a crowd had gathered around the fetch. They were respecting Landasher’s order not to go into the pit. But he hadn’t said anything about the parachute. I climbed up onto the top of the fetch and announced: “Each of you is responsible for one shroud line. We’ll pull the chute out and spread it on the ground. Form a ring around its edge. Choose your line. Then radiate. Spread the lines outwards, untangling them as you go. In ten minutes I would like to see the whole population of Orithena standing in a huge circle around this parachute, each holding the end of a line.”
A pretty simple plan. It got quite a bit messier as they put it into practice. But they were smart people, and the less fussing and meddling I did, the better they showed themselves at dreaming up solutions to problems. Meanwhile I had Yul estimate the length of a single shroud line by counting fathoms with his arms.
Gnel drove his fetch out from under the spreading chute and down the ramp to the bottom of the pit. He had equipped it with a battery of high-powered lights that I had always found ridiculous. Tonight, he had finally found something to aim them at. I took a moment to glance down, and saw that Orolo and Cord had approached to within twenty feet of the probe.
Getting the Orithenans spread out around the chute took a little while. A supersonic jet screamed overhead and startled us.
Yul’s measurement confirmed my general impression, which was that the shroud lines were something like half as long as the pit was wide. Once I explained the general plan to the Orithenans, they began to move toward the edge of the pit, parting to either side and circumventing the rim while keeping the shroud lines taut. The chute glided across the ground in fits and starts. We had to get a few people underneath it to coax and waft it over snags. But presently the leading edge of the fabric curled over the rim of the pit, and then the movement took on a life of its own as gravity helped it forward. I hoped the Orithenans on the ends of the lines would have the good sense to let go the ropes if they felt themselves being pulled toward the edge. But the chute wasn’t nearly heavy enough to cause any such problems. Once all of the fabric had gone over the edge, and the Orithenans had spaced themselves evenly around it, the thing became quite manageable. The chute seemed to cover about half of the pit’s area. The Orithenans by now had figured out the general idea, which was that we wanted to suspend the parachute above the Teglon plaza as a canopy. They began to move about en masse, adjusting its position and its altitude with no further direction from me. When it seemed right, I jogged around the perimeter urging them to move away from the hole and trace their shroud lines out as far as they could go, and to lash the ends around any solid anchors they could find. For about a third of them, this ended up being the top of the concent’s outer wall. Other lines ended up finding purchase on trees, Cloister pillars, trestles, rocks, or sticks hammered into the ground.
Hearing an engine, I looked over to the top of the ramp and saw that Yul was gingerly driving his house-on-wheels down into the pit—the better, I guessed, to cook breakfast for the Geometers. I sprinted over and dived into the cabin with him. This sparked a general rebellion among the Orithenans who, ignoring Landasher’s earlier order, followed us down on foot.
Yul and I drove down the ramp in silence. The look on his face was as if he were just on the verge of hysterical laughter. When we reached the bottom, he parked amid the ruins of the Temple, just near the Analemma. He shut off the engine. He turned to look at me and finally broke the silence. “I don’t know how this is going to come out,” he said, “but I sure am glad I came with you.” And, before I could tell him how glad I was of his company, he was out the door, striding over to join Cord.
Radiant heat from the underside of the vehicle was making it difficult to approach. Yul went back to his fetch and got some reflective emergency blankets. Cord, Orolo, and I used these as bolts. Most of the vehicle was above us, so we put out a call for ladders.
It had been difficult to guess the thing’s size before, but now I was able to borrow a measuring rod from the archaeological dig and measure it at about twenty feet in diameter. I hadn’t brought anything to write with, but Sammann was using his jeejah in speelycaptor mode, taking everything down, so I called out the numbers.
A helicopter approached. We could hear it through the canopy. It circled the compound a few times, its downwash creating huge, eye-catching disturbances in the canopy. Then it withdrew to a higher altitude and hovered. It could not land here because of the parachute. All the land within the walls was built on or cultivated with trees and trellises. They’d have to land outside and knock on the door, or scale the wall.
So we had stalled them for a few minutes. But everyone felt desperately short of time now. Suddenly a dozen ladders were available—all different sizes, all hand-crafted of wood. The Orithenans began lashing them together to make a scaffold right next to the probe, on the side that seemed to have a sort of hatch. Cord clambered up and found a place to stand on a ladder that had been placed horizontally. I felt proud watching her. So much about this might have been overwhelming. At some level perhaps she was overwhelmed. But this probe was, after all, a machine. She could tell how it worked. And as long as she held her focus on that, none of the other stuff mattered.
“Talk to us!” Sammann called to her, staring at the screen of his jeejah as he lined up his shot.
“There is clearly a removable hatch,” she said. “It is trapezoidal with rounded corners. Two feet wide at the base. One and a half at the top. Four high. Curved like the fuselage.” She was doing a funny kind of dance, because the scaffold was still being improvised beneath her—she was poised between two ladder-rungs and the ladder kept shifting. She was casting an array of lapping shadows on what she wanted to see, so she fished a headlamp out of her vest, turned it on, and played its beam over the streaked and burned surface of the probe.