Echoes of an Alien Sky (20 page)

"I just have to make a call," Elundi said. "Sit down. I'll be back in a moment."

He went up the stairs to the hallway outside the function room, which was not being used that night—it was quieter, besides having more privacy. What was that guy in Molecular Biology'sname? He checked his phone register. Iwon, that was it. He flagged the code and pressed the Connect button. Iwon's face with its ragged Terran-style mustache appeared in the window after a few beeps.

"Hi, Iwon, do you remember me?"

"Oh, right . . . from the Linguistics office. I enjoyed the chat. Good to hear from you again. What can I do?"

"Do you know a person in the Mol Bio section by the name of Lorili?

"Lorili Hilivar? Sure, I work with her."

"So you'd be able to call her?"

"Yes, naturally. Why? What's up?"

"Look, I may be over-reacting here, but I'd rather play it on the safe side. I think there might be trouble heading her way right now. Can you call her and tell her that Jenyn's on his way, and he's in a mean mood. I think she'll know what that means. Whatever she wants to do about it is up to her. But I thought she ought to know."

"'Jenyn.' Iwon repeated. Thankfully, he didn't seem to be the kind who wanted details and explanations.

"Right."

"I'll call her right now."

Lorili was in her neighbor Ufty's apartment upstairs, across the way, by the time Jenyn arrived at her door. Keeping back in the shadows behind the window fronting the balcony, the light turned off, they watched as he jabbed repeatedly at the door chime, and then banged loudly on the door, calling out her name. He swayed back a few steps to survey the place, stalked around muttering, then went back to the door again and banged some more. Faces appeared in some of the nearby windows. Finally, he left.

"It happens that way with some people," Ufty commented, shaking his head. "He's just had one too many. He'll be okay in the morning."

"No, you don't know him," Lorili replied. A sick, sinking feeling had taken hold of her. "This isn't going to be the last of it."

A block away, Jenyn stopped on the corner and stood glowering along the street for a while. Then he took out his phone and called Tyrala. She seemed surprised and also pleased.

"So soon! We decided to miss the play. Derlen has gone on home. Changed your mind?"

"Would you still like to be envied and famous?"

"Well, whatever comes to us naturally, you know. . . ."

"I could have a job for you that would be a big step in the right direction." Jenyn looked at the image pouting out at him. "And maybe the rest too," he said.

The Special Task Committee met in room of the military command complex on the west side of New Washington known as the Hexagon—its architects had had to go one step better than their predecessors. It functioned under the auspices of the Joint Services Internal Security Office but its name didn't appear in any of the official departmental listings. It was chaired by an Army general known to the others and written up in the minutes simply as "Polo."

"Okay, that's settled." He shuffled the papers that they were done with to the bottom of his folder. "Moving on to Item Three." The sheets that came to the top referred to an article by Herbert Gorman that had appeared two days previously in the left-sponsored political incitement journal,
Insider
. Polo allowed a minute or so for himself and others to refresh themselves. It was the latest in a series that Gorman had been putting out on mysterious "disappearances" of key people. Apparently, the attempts to send him a discreet warning were having no effect. If anything, his tone was even more defiant and militant. It was inexplicable to Polo that the obvious talent Gorman displayed in one direction could be accompanied by such foolishness in another. Gorman
knew
how the system worked, yet he seemed unable to apply the obvious implications to himself. Polo didn't believe in willingness to sacrifice oneself for a principle. That was the stuff of uplifting stories as fodder for the sheep pen. But it could have no place in the mind of any realist.

"I thought this rag was going to be shut down," somebody halfway along the table murmured.

"It's being worked on," another voice said.

"What's this note about Perrin-McLeod?" Polo asked. He looked up. "It says Juggler has something."

The officer that he had addressed read from a laptop. "Gorman has been talking to the wife, Sandra, trying to track her husband. According to a source who's close to her, he asked her if she knew anything about a code word Terminus. She told him she didn't."

Polo frowned. "How in hell did Gorman get hold of that?" he asked, looking around.

"More to the point, how did he connect it to the disappearances he's been writing about?" someone else added. Nobody responded.

"This has gone too far," Polo declared. "He's already run the stop sign. I think he case goes to Removals. Anyone disagree? . . . Any further points? Okay. Cymbal, will you take care of this?"

A broad, gray-headed, unsmiling figure in a plain tunic without insignia nodded.

Polo moved the sheets to the bottom of the folder. "Okay, moving along. Item Four. . . ."

Three days later, the media carried the story that a New Washington journalist called Herbert Gorman had been killed by a car bomb outside his home. He had been a controversial writer with outspoken views on a number of inflammatory topics that had earned him enmity from many quarters, including unstable political regimes and international terrorist groups, so such an incident wasn't entirely unexpected.

Not long afterward, the story surfaced that Gorman had been working on a piece to expose secret plans by Muslim governments in Southeast Asia to destabilize the situation in parts of southern China that were wavering over Beijing's leaning closer toward America. Experts duly appeared, expressing suspicion of Southeast Asian political terror groups believed to be infiltrating the country. Their connection with Gorman was corroborated by the production of a threatening note warning him off that line of research. It was said to have been found among Gorman's papers. There was even a security camera clip from a gas station not far from Gorman's home, allegedly taken early on the morning of the murder, showing an Oriental filling the tank of a car, acting suspiciously, and checking trunk before departing.

None of this caused any great surprise. After all, everyone knew that terrorists from that part of the world were everywhere and were likely to do things like that at any time, anyway.

The short-haul service flyer skimmed low over the terrain of lunar Farside. Yorim was at the controls of surface, Kyal beside him. Some familiarization with piloting came as part of the training package for lunar environments. They were both suited up and had the cabin evacuated in preparation for outside work on arrival. Casselo had left Triagon to return to
Explorer 6
. The discovery of the sixty-eight Terran corpses, intact and in an unprecedented state of preservation, was getting the biologists excited, and Sherven was considering setting up a more comprehensively equipped biological laboratory at Triagon to study them.

Yorim was intrigued by this woman at Rhombus who seemed to communicate with Kyal more frequently than he thought a mere casual acquaintanceship would call for. It intrigued him because over the years he had always known Kyal as being reserved and conservative in his ways, focused on his work, and not of an inclination to involve himself in such things. And now, all of a suddenly, he's being publicly hugged at the spaceport by this person he's met only days before who has come out of her way to seem him off, not only striking in all the eye-catching ways that would have gotten Yorim's attention at any time, but from some of the oddments he'd heard since, pretty interesting and unconventional in herself as well. He wasn't letting Kyal off the hook until he'd learned more.

"So are you telling me you didn't have this set up all along? That wasn't why you ducked out at Rhombus and went your own way?" he challenged.

"How could I have? We'd only just arrived on Earth," Kyal retorted. "I told you, I met her in that city up in the Caucasus. It just turned out that we have the same kind of interests."

"That's it, eh?" Yorim looked sideways inside his helmet with an expression that said maybe he believed it but many wouldn't.

"And okay, yes, she's different as a person from most that you meet," Kyal said. "Curious about things. Thinks for herself and forms her own opinions. I like that."

"Is she a Prog, out of curiosity? Brysek says there's a lot of interest in it around Rhombus."

Kyal waved a gloved hand vaguely. "She thinks that some of what they're saying is worth thinking about—maybe we've gotten a bit too set in our ways and could give youth and diversity more openings. . . . Apparently she was mixed up with it for a while back on Venus."

It wasn't something that Kyal wanted to go into, Yorim read, so he didn't ask about it. "I thought you said she was into that Terran theory of life appearing by itself, out of chemistry," he said instead.

"She's curious about it. But simply as a scientist—trying not to pre-judge anything until she's had a chance to look at it and think about it. That's the way it ought to be. See what I mean? She'll figure out for herself what she wants to believe. Nothing wrong with that."

The monotony of dust, rocks, and crater rims rolled by below. They were about a hundred miles from Triagon.

"Why are the Progressives so keen on the idea?" Yorim asked.

"You mean that extrapolating selective adaptation without limit can explain everything?"

"Yes. I mean, whether it's true or not is going to be a matter of objective fact—either true or not true. Whatever they, you, me, or anyone else thinks isn't going to change it. What does it have to do with their politics?"

"I suppose maybe if you're not a scientist, you don't think about it that way. If you can convince people it's true, then you can point to it as validating your ideology." Kyal held up a hand before Yorim could respond. "Yes, I know that doesn't make it true. But in politics it's what people believe that matters."

Another short silence fell. Yorim glanced over the flight processor and status displays while he thought about it. "So what is there about it that appeals to their ideology?"

"The notion of unrestrained striving and competition. Being able to go all-out and use any means to get what
you
want, with nobody and nothing to answer to—as opposed to existing as part of something larger that you have to learn to harmonize with. It fits with their platform of changing the system by demands and coercion—and some of them say violence if need be."

As with many things, Yorim had dabbled in Progressivism for a while, but found that he couldn't relate. Maybe things on Venus did change a bit slowly and try the patience of some, but were they really any worse off at the end of it all than the Terrans with their frenetic pace of building things up, when they devoted as much energy and industry to knocking them down again?

"Emur Frazing said the general Terran belief was that there really wasn't any choice if you wanted to change things," Kyal recalled. "At the end of it all, nothing else worked. Force was the only way."

Yorim made a face. "If that's what they thought, I guess it explains a lot."

"They believed that whoever had the power never let it go voluntarily. They had to be made to."

"The Progs say the same thing."

Kyal tossed up a hand. "Well, there's your answer. That's how their ideology fits. Maybe they got it from the Terrans." He mulled over it some more and then went on, "Their leaders were very different from ours. Maybe there's another part of your reason too. We think of political and social leaders as belonging the same family. They work to try and get what's best for everybody, right?"

"Well . . . yeah" Yorim had never thought about it being any other way. After all, what else were they there for?

"But with the Terrans it was different," Kyal went on. The leaders were an elite class among themselves—across-the board, even on the opposite sides of wars. The rest of the people were just expendables to be exploited. Of course that wasn't the way they were told. They were kept divided against each other in ways such that they always thought some other group was the cause of their problems. So they were never able to unite against the real common enemy of all of them."

Yorim was having trouble picturing it. A people's leaders working against the people? It sounded like a self-contradiction. He shook his head. "But . . . they didn't
know
?" he objected.

"The business of their mass communications was to indoctrinate, not educate," Kyal replied. "Dissemination of official lies. The media were owned by the ones who stood to benefit."

"But it must sill have been obvious that the leaders were doing a lousy job. How could the Electors stay in office? Or are you saying they owned the Electors too?"

"They didn't have Electors. The people appointed the leaders direct."

Yorim frowned across as if to make sure that Kyal wasn't joking. "But that's crazy. It would be like . . . like expecting someone on the street to pick who should design the
Melther Jorg
—instead of the people at ISA whose job it is. You and I wouldn't be here."

Kyal shrugged. "That's how the exo-historians figure it was."

"No wonder they had lousy leaders," Yorim said.

Kyal looked at the control panel clock "We must be getting close," he commented.

"Almost." As if on cue, an alert beeped to tell them they were coming onto final approach. "I think I see it," Yorim said.

Kyal peered ahead and picked out the pointed tip among the sunlit crags and ridges ahead."There was something else, deeper down, that made Terran social structures different," he said. "Ours work together, to try and make the quality of life better for all. Oh, yes of course they have differences at times, but the whole art is to resolve them. Terrans worked against each other. The aim all the time was to 'win,' which meant someone else had to lose. "