Dancers in the Afterglow (4 page)

But that wasn't the city. Not really. A city wasn't a set of structures; those were mere artifacts. A city was people. He watched them on the eternally crowded walkways, an endless stream rushing in and out of buildings, talking, laughing, sometimes interacting.

It had been a long, long time since he'd been in a city, or anywhere except the Combine R&D asteroids off Altair. A long, long time since he had interacted with any but clinical scientists and cartoon bureaucrats.

He started walking down the avenue, walking with the jostling crowd, looking at their myriad faces reflected in the store windows at base level. A human perpetual-motion machine.

He passed the first test, he knew. Nobody gave him a second glance.

He felt the old longing still within him, that longing for company, companionship, humanity. He thought he'd put that all behind him, but he had not. Looking just like them, acting just like them—feeling just like them. He had never realized what it would mean to cut himself off like this. Not until now, with that faceless mob swirling, walking, talking, pressing around him.

He'd come in straight from the spaceport by taxi-cab—he knew it was really the I-boys keeping watch on him. Some of them still were. He knew them, knew where they were, could even selectively tune in their whispers from amid the roar of the city. It didn't matter.

He frowned.
This
mattered.

Almost absentmindedly, he found himself taking a seat near the street in a sidewalk cafe. He glanced down at the little table, pressed
Menu,
and quickly scanned it. He ordered apple pie and coffee—he'd always liked apple pie. Then he presented his account slip and charged the snack to the Combine.

The pie and coffee arrived on a little robotray less than two minutes later. He took them and looked at them in wonder. He switched to a high olfactory mode, and smelled not only the wonders of the food, but the less obtrusive scents of the city as well. A few bites, though, and he knew this was all wrong. Just part of the act. He knew where the food was going, and what would happen to it, and all sensory impressions stopped the moment he swallowed it.

He sighed and left the remains to be cleaned up.

He boarded a tram for the spaceport and took a seat. The tram wasn't particularly crowded; it was midday, not rush hour.

He suddenly became aware of being stared at, and for a moment thought one of those clumsy tails Hudkins used was following him. Then he realized it was a young woman, a teenager really, dressed informally for the summer's heat in what looked like a hula skirt made of a comfortable artificial fiber, sandals, and, except for a pair of large hooped earrings and a small jewel-ring through her nose, nothing else. She had the build for it, he thought. On some worlds that outfit would be cause for panic, but here on Roncik, in the capital city of Nueva Asuncion, it was ordinary casual attire.

She saw him look at her, and smiled. He returned the smile, and she accepted the gesture as an opening. "I'm sorry for staring," she began, sounding not the least bit sorry, "but I couldn't help notice your face and clothes. You're not a Ronnie."

"No, I'm not," he admitted. "I haven't been from anyplace in a long, long time."

She leaned forward, excitedly. "I just
knew
you were a spacer! Your manner—the way you walked when you got on. What ship?"

"A little one," he responded. "My own ship. Basically automated. I'm the only crew."

"Jesus!" she exclaimed. "Don't you get lonely out there?"

He managed a wan smile. Yes, he thought to himself, the dull ache brought back by the city and extended human contact rushing into him. Yes, lonely isn't the word for it. But aloud he said, "No, it's not particularly bad. You get used to it."

"Wow!" she exclaimed, impressed. "I just can't imagine it. All those other worlds, other people, other cultures." She looked almost ashamed. "I've never been more than a hundred kilometers from Nueva Asuncion." She pronounced it "Nuevashunshun," he noticed, as if it were one bouncy word.

"People are people," he told her. "Different hangups, different dress, religion, or whatever, but people are more alike than you'd believe." Or know, he added to himself. Particularly in the important ways, the ways in which human beings treated one another. He looked around at the few other passengers on the tram. Most ignored or pretended to ignore their conversation. Why had she picked
him,
after all, instead of one of them? He was handsome, dressed differently, and with a look that, here, was exotic.

They talked on a little, and she came over and sat beside him. He knew what she wanted, and he knew what he wanted—and that last surprised him, for he'd felt no such sensations for years, and wasn't supposed to be able to feel them anymore. Hormones and all that, they'd said. Well, though it was true he didn't feel the same, the longing was still there. Then, suddenly, he felt the walls close in on him, the barriers only he knew grew suddenly tangible. He knew she had long passed her stop and was expecting him to take her out on the town or show her his ship or somesuch.

The tram ground to a halt at the spaceport, end of the line. He got up, and she followed. Finally, he turned and faced her, towering somewhat over her slender figure. "I'm sorry, but I've got to leave you here. I'm due back on my ship at once, and it's in orbit I'll have to shuttle up. But it was really good talking to you."

Disappointment was strong in her face and frustration in her stance and manner, but she smiled and shrugged it off. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him lightly.

"Maybe next time you're here."

His expression was strange and distant. "Sure. Maybe next time," he echoed, and turned and walked off.

The man known as Daniel rode the escalator up to the debarkation area, then walked across the main terminal briskly, entering a door marked
RESTRICTED AREA—DO NOT ENTER
without pause. The warning on the door was unnecessary; only a very few could open it anyway.

A young man with sandy hair turned away from a complex console. "Hi, Daniel!" he called. "How'd it go?"

He sighed. "Worse than could be expected."

The other man nodded sympathetically. "Well, we knew it might be rough. The important thing is that nobody knew you were anything but a dashing space captain."

Daniel managed a chuckle. Important to whom, Mordi? The navy? Sure. The mission? Sure. But what about Daniel? Did anyone ever think about Daniel? Everybody thinks about himself, he concluded, his depression deepening. Nobody ever gives a damn about the other fellow. Everyone thinks of himself as a unique individual, but everyone else—well, they're all just ciphers.

"You ready?" Mordi called to him. "I have clearance in nine minutes."

Daniel nodded. "Might as well. The material on Ondine going to be beamed up to me?"

"I'll have all that for you before you break orbit" Mordi hesitated for a minute, dropping his jocular air, his face growing serious, concerned. "You sure you want to do this? I mean—you feel you want to?"

Daniel sighed. "Mordi, I've had four years as a laboratory rat in every Combine scientist's maze. I'm sick and tired of it, I'm bored, and, in addition, the only way to prove or disprove the system is in the field."

"Okay, then. Get in."

He walked over to a sliding door, pulled it open, and stepped into a cylindrical capsule. The door closed, and then the cylinder snapped shut. He heard the switches and relays, and nodded to himself. All was ready.

The capsule was form-fitting and airtight. As he waited for lift, the little gages told him the ulterior of the capsule was now a vacuum.

It didn't matter to Daniel.

The capsule ejected, registered as a freight capsule with no lifeform aboard, and climbed rapidly into the sky.

And the listing was correct. There was no lifeform aboard.

Daniel tracked the capsule, locked onto it, and guided it in. It approached rapidly, then decelerated at a rate that would have killed anything human. Now it floated only meters from an opening in what looked like a golden egg perhaps thirty meters in diameter.

Slowly the capsule eased into the open hole, then locked in, its base almost seamlessly flush with the exterior of the egg.

"Feed me the Ondine stuff, Mordi," Daniel ordered.

He wanted to get his mind off the people, the trams, the apple pie, and the girl.

Ripieno

ONDINE WAS DISCOVERED IN
861
A.C. BY A GOVERNMENT
scout. It wasn't great to look at.

The star was G-class, which was good, and the distance from the star to Ondine, second of seven planets worth mentioning in the system, was about 135 million kilometers. Its axial tilt was almost 84 degrees, so it was warm and had little in the way of seasons.

About 80 percent Terra-size, Ondine's gravity was lighter but only comfortably so. An active planet, geologically; lots of water and mountain ranges, volcanoes* and whatnot, even though it had a lot of gasses that humans could do without, and was an inferno. The place was solid clouds, really—it was too hot everyplace for water to condense.

But the planet had potential. The Terraformers had worked with less, but, they had always had some reason for undertaking difficult projects. This world was off the beaten track, had few usable resources, and seemed destined to sit there until it boiled away or became, in the millennia, something more interesting.

The scout duly filed his report, named the planet Ondine after his third daughter, and left.

After a suitable interval, wherein the Combine looked at it, analyzed it, and decided it wasn't worth anything to them, Ondine was listed on the Exchange.

The Exchange was where groups with money go. It listed all of the discovered worlds and all the pertinent facts. The brokers had all this information at their fingertips. Any one of them, acting for a client, could put in a one-hundred-unit claim on the place, thus giving it to the client for a period of five standard years. If the claim were challenged, the Combine delightedly held an auction, with the rights going to the highest bidder, since one hundred units was roughly the price of a ream of paper.

Who bought worlds? Big corporations sometimes; occasionally local governments, to handle population or other pressures. Religious and political groups were especially active in
this field. If they had any kind of following at all, they could raise the money, develop a world on their model, and "prove" their ideas.

And get out of everybody's hair.

The owner could do anything with his planet for the five years, even blow it up, but if he did
nothing,
then it reverted to the listing. Many did.

Ondine had been claimed eleven times in the century following its discovery, but no one could do anything with it. The trouble was cost—nobody had the kind of money it would take to make Ondine livable.

Until Bartol Alvarez Chu Lin came along.

Lin was the kind of man who'd grown rich by exploiting the lives and property of everyone he touched and then felt guilty about it as he grew older. He was upset. He had nine hundred and thirty-eight greatgrandchildren and they were living packed into sardine-can cities on nameless worlds, looking for places to play.

Lin had built amusement parks before, but suddenly he dreamed of a new kind—a world that would be the ultimate getaway spot.

Ondine only cost him a hundred units to obtain, but it cost half his fortune to remake the way he wanted it and dreamed of it, money enough to finance several planetary budgets for many years.

The planetary engineers accepted the challenge. They increased the axial tilt to a perfect ninety degrees, eliminating seasons and stirring up a lot of new volcanic activity which they controlled. They
used molten magma to build their land masses, then stabilized the volcanoes. They added a series of inert gasses and applied electrical charges to build and control an upper-atmosphere protective layer around the planet.

The surface cooled—very slowly at first, but it cooled, and condensation occurred. It rained everywhere on the planet. It rained for twenty-seven years, torrentially, while the engineers paid attention to other details.

And once finished, they had a pretty little world, all blue under the ever-present white clouds. Four continental land masses, not huge but large enough, centered in the temperate zones between twenty and seventy degrees latitude. Millions of islands dotting the seas, from a few kilometers square to a few thousand. Some minor adjustments for the proper radiation, heat level, and the like, and they were ready.

Any known lifeform could live there.

In came the Life Boys, as they were jokingly called in the trade. They had clonable tissue from just about every plant and animal that had ever lived in the known galaxy, and samples of almost every microorganism, virus, and whatnot, including ones you'd rather not have.

It was a miniature, high-speed Creation. First the microbes, and when they lived and adapted well to Ondine without producing crazy mutations, more ambitious material was introduced. Simple one-celled animals in the seas, which fed on the microbes. And, of course, plants. Lots and lots of trees atop ground igneous rock that always had made the best soil. The forests would control erosion and add the proper balance. They also absorbed excess water and carbon dioxide.

Ondine became a water world and a jungle. With few natural enemies, the trees and other plants had a field day. Grasses, flowers, all were added in climatologically perfect areas, even the islands.

The seas were stocked with fish, shellfish, and, eventually, marine mammals in perfect proportion. Food chains were laboriously worked out for sea and land.