Eisenstadt paused in mid-sentence. "A drone? What's that?"
"Body-home grown from ster... ilized seed for use of... any who needs it."
For a moment Eisenstadt seemed taken aback. "What do you mean, any who needs it? Don't all of you have your own body-homes?"
Again, the answer was silence. "They told us their body-homes can die," Calandra reminded Eisenstadt softly. "Perhaps growing spare bodies is their version of immortality."
Eisenstadt threw her a sharp look. "Let's try and keep metaphysics out of this," he growled at her... but behind the words I could hear his acute uneasiness with the idea. "All right, thunderhead, we accept. Can you point one of these drones out to us?"
A slight pause. Then, in unison as always, Zagorin and Adams each raised an arm and pointed. "There," they whispered. "Two thousand four hundred... eighty-seven heights."
"Which heights?" Eisenstadt asked. "Ours, yours? These mountains'?"
"Doctor!" one of the monitors called before the Seekers could answer. "Getting cardiac runaway in Adams!"
"Adams! Break contact!"
It took me half a second to realize that the shout had come from me. The twisted expression on Adams's face—the sudden tension throughout his body—it almost literally screamed to me of lethal stress. I took a step toward him—
And was brought up sharply by Eisenstadt's hand on my arm. "Doctor—!"
"Let's wait and see what the thunderheads do," he told me, his voice rigid. "Whether or not they release him on their own."
I twisted my head to stare at him, not believing it. "And if they don't?" I snapped.
His eyes stayed on Adams. "We need to know what kind of value the thunderheads place on human life. This is as good a time as any to find out."
Because Adams was a Halloa. A religious fanatic... and therefore expendable. I clenched my teeth hard enough to hurt and turned back to the Seekers. Adams's stress was still growing—becoming critical— "Thunderhead!" I shouted. "You're killing him! Let him go!"
For a long second nothing happened. Then, abruptly, the alien sense was gone from both Adams and Zagorin. Zagorin slumped, breathing hard through slack lips—
As Adams collapsed, unconscious, to the ground.
—
The physician on Eisenstadt's team was young, brisk, and—unlike many I'd known—perfectly willing to admit to a certain degree of professional ignorance. "If you want the bottom line," he said, shaking his head, "it's that I can't tell you what exactly happened to him."
Eisenstadt glowered. "And that's the best you can do?"
"Oh, no," the physician said, undaunted by his superior's displeasure. "I said I didn't know what happened; that's not to say I can't treat the results." He leaned over his desk to call up a display. "Here, for instance, he shows signs of having had a mild stroke—we're already cleaning up the damage there." Another display. "Cardiac trauma. We'll probably wind up having to rebuild parts of his heart, but for the moment he's perfectly stable. Ditto for the other bits of scattered damage he sustained."
Eisenstadt nodded. "What about the woman?"
The physician shrugged. "Mild stress-related traumas in heart and central nervous system. No permanent damage, though."
"Why not?" I asked. "Because she's younger than he is?"
"That's a large part of it," the physician nodded. "Mr. Adams also had a definite predisposition to cardiac problems going into... whatever it was he went into."
"Which the stress then triggered," Eisenstadt nodded, ignoring the physician's thinly veiled curiosity. "Could you say, then, that any normally healthy person, having undergone the same stress, would come out of it all right?"
The physician cocked an eyebrow. "I'd hardly say that, Doctor—certainly not with just two casepoints to extrapolate from. It could just as easily be that Ms. Zagorin has stronger than average resistance to whatever it was happened to the two of them."
Eisenstadt considered that a moment. "All right, then," he said slowly. "Having seen what this stress does... would it be possible to somehow pretreat someone so as to minimize the resulting damage?"
The other shrugged. "If the results of the stress remain consistent, certainly. Again, having seen only two casepoints I can't guarantee that the next person won't develop something entirely different."
Eisenstadt's lip twisted. "I suppose it's a chance we'll just have to take. When can we see Ms. Zagorin?"
The physician called up another display. "Give her another few minutes, anyway," he said. "No permanent damage doesn't mean that the thing wasn't traumatic for her. Besides which, the longer you give us to wash the preventatives and diagnostics out of her system, the more coherent she'll be."
Eisenstadt nodded. "Thank you," he said.
We left the office. Calandra, along with her usual pair of Pravilos, was waiting out in the hall; without even looking at her, Eisenstadt took her arm and led the two of us down to an empty conference room. "Wait outside," he told the Pravilos briefly. Ushering us in, he closed the door.
For a long minute he just looked at us, a whole range of conflicting emotions following each other across his face. "Well?" he growled at last, somewhat reluctantly. "Let's have your opinions."
Not our report, I noted, but our opinions. Boldfacing the subjectivity of our talents. Still, he had asked, and even grudging interest was a step up. "Both Shepherd Adams and Shepherd Zagorin were in contact with one or more of the thunderheads," I told him. "There simply isn't room for fraud or error in what happened out there."
He snorted. "Much as I might wish it were otherwise, I have to agree. Assuming, of course, that the search teams find a dead thunderhead in the direction they gave us. So. The thunderheads are alive and sentient and they really can travel out of their bodies. What can you tell me about them?"
I gestured Calandra to go first. "They're clearly intelligent, first of all," she said slowly, forehead furrowed in thought and memory. "I'd guess they've been studying us for quite some time. At least as long as the Halo of God has been here; possibly since the first colonists arrived at Solitaire."
"What makes you say that?" Eisenstadt frowned.
"Their ability to use human speech apparatus to communicate, for starters," Calandra said. "Besides that—" She hesitated, looking at me.
And a piece fell into place. "The general paranoia on Solitaire," I said. "It's a subconscious resistance to the thunderheads' presence, isn't it?"
Her eyes were oddly haunted. "I think so, yes."
I could see Eisenstadt debating whether or not to pursue this line further, deciding to shelve it for the moment. "All right; so you think the thunderheads are intelligent and that they've been studying us. What else?"
Calandra took a deep breath. "Obviously... they're also the ones who've been guiding our ships to Solitaire for the past seventy years."
The muscles in Eisenstadt's jaw tightened... but the thought was clearly not a new one to him. "They're certainly the most likely candidates," he admitted. "You have anything on that besides guesswork?"
"The way their arms moved," I said slowly, replaying the contact in my mind's eye. "The muscle sequences they went through when they pointed the way to the dead thunderhead." I focused on Eisenstadt, found him looking intently back at me. "It was virtually identical to the hand movements I saw in the Bellwether's... on our trip into Solitaire system."
His eyes bored into mine. "You certain?"
"As certain as I can be," I said.