"Maybe, maybe not," I shook my head. "We don't know for certain—which is why it would be safest to keep these direct contacts limited to as few people as possible. Besides which... Calandra and I spent some time with both Shepherd Adams and Shepherd Zagorin when we first came to Spall. We don't know any of the other Seekers nearly as well."
Eisenstadt frowned at me for a long moment... and then he understood. "You really think you could spot any alterations the thunderheads might make in them?"
"I don't know," I said honestly. "But we'd have a better chance with them than with anyone else, at least until we've gotten to know them better."
Eisenstadt pursed his lips, considering. "Your boss—Kelsey-Ramos—told me that you have something of a gift for persuasion. Specifically, that you'd probably try to make you and your friend too valuable for me to easily get rid of."
"Mr. Kelsey-Ramos exaggerates," I said between dry lips.
"Perhaps." Eisenstadt grimaced. "Unfortunately, even knowing the hook's there, I seem to be stuck with the bait." He took a deep breath. "All right, you've convinced me. For now, anyway, we'll stick with Zagorin. I suppose it would make sense to wait a day or two before talking to them again, anyway—give us a chance to study the dead thunderhead we're allegedly getting." He glanced at his watch. "Which reminds me, I ought to go check on their progress."
"Would you like Calandra or me to come with you?"
"When we actually find the thing, probably. Until then—" he jerked a thumb at the door behind him—"your job is to spend your time getting to know Zagorin as well as you can. Just in case."
I sighed quietly. "Yes, sir."
He eyed me. "Something else?"
"I... don't know." I shook my head slowly, trying to identify the uncomfortable darkness hovering like a nighttime predator at the edge of my mind. "I guess I just don't like having to guess what it is about the Cloud that the thunderheads don't want us to know about."
He snorted. "I don't much like it myself. Do try to remember that it was you who just talked me out of sending for more Halloas and dragging the secret out of the thunderheads right here and now."
"I know, sir. But..."
"And anyway," he added, "whatever it is, they've kept it to themselves for at least seventy years. A few days, one way or another, isn't likely to make any difference."
He was right, of course, I told myself as he strode briskly away to check on his search team. After seventy years, a couple of days could hardly be important.
I hoped.
Chapter 25
It was, in fact, considerably more than a couple of days before Eisenstadt was ready to talk to the thunderheads again. Though Shepherd Zagorin seemed ready and willing to make another attempt by the next morning, the physician charged with preparing her was reluctant to administer his proposed pre-treatment mixture without doing a few more tests on both it and her; and before he had time to complete them, Eisenstadt's search team finally located the dead thunderhead.
Most everyone, I gathered—from Eisenstadt on down—had privately concluded that the directions we'd been given had somehow been misread, and it was only through mule-headed persistence on the search leader's part that the dead thunderhead was located at all. The "height" the thunderheads had used in giving distance, it turned out, was neither their own physical height nor ours, but a length that was finally identified as the height of the common building in Shepherd Zagorin's Myrrh settlement. For me, it seemed just one more indication that the thunderheads had been observing the Halo of God settlers since their arrival; Eisenstadt, conversely, wondered aloud whether it was a deliberate delaying tactic. But it wasn't long before the sheer scientific excitement drove such political/military considerations into the background of his mind and allowed the pure scientist to shine through again.
To shine through with a vengeance. For all but his inner circle he virtually ceased to exist, disappearing into the project as if inhaled by it. Every waking hour was spent either in the clean room with the examination team or else in his office studying the data that was being extracted by the double cylful. His rare sleeping hours were probably spent dreaming about it.
I'd spent eight years with Lord Kelsey-Ramos, who hadn't pushed Carillon to the top by being lazy; but even by those standards Eisenstadt's capacity and energy were astounding. Armed with a full clearance to the information—a courtesy that I suspected for a long time had been an accidental oversight on his part—I did my best to keep up with as much of the flood of information as I could. But even just following the nontechnical summaries was almost more than I could handle.
Thunderheads, it turned out, were in many ways an almost even mixture of plant and animal characteristics. Our dead drone, once extracted, left behind it an extensive network of hairlike roots extending up to twenty meters into the ground, a nutrient-gathering system which at least partially explained how they were able to survive on top of barren bluffs as well as amid lush vegetation. The root system contained an unusual twist, though: a close examination showed that each of the fibers went through a living/dead/decomposing cycle that actually encouraged nearby plant growth by flooding the soil with vital trace elements.
The discovery, exciting though it was to the scientists, was greeted with a certain chagrin by those who had had to dig the drone up and would presumably be called on to do so again. Along with the problem of having to slog through matted plants to get to the thunderhead, they had quickly found that those same plants sheltered the nests of a fairly nasty species of stinging insect, insects who had had to be gassed before the drone could be approached. For a day or two afterward there were rumors that the workers had asked either that the next specimen be taken from Butte City, where no such plants or insects existed, or else that Eisenstadt assign the next sampling run to a fully armored Pravilo team.
The rumors faded with time. I doubt Eisenstadt ever even noticed them.
There were a great many other plantlike characteristics, too, cellular structure among them. But at the same time there were enough animal-like qualities to keep the thunderheads from simply being labeled as sessile, sentient plants. They had almost the entire set of normal animal senses, for one thing, including sight, hearing, a limited sense of touch, and a combined chemical analysis system nestled beneath the wave-like overhang that combined smell and taste. Their sight, in particular, was surprisingly well developed, especially given that it relied on fairly simple cellular lenses scattered in a semi-random pattern across the whole of the body. It took a great deal of computer modeling time to finally show that the hard-wired neural pathways connecting the lenses to each other and the brain actually acted as as sort of organic computer, combining and cleaning up the blurry images into something as clear as human eyesight.
The drone had a true circulatory system too, not just primitive ducts for transporting sap and water, though the system operated via a combination of vascular pressure, capillary action, and gravity instead of a heart. There were also several distinct organs scattered throughout the body, though there was a great deal of heated debate as to the functions each might serve. The brain and central nervous system were fairly decentralized, though the neural density increased markedly near the various sensory organs and each of the cellular eyes.
There was more to be learned—a great deal more—and Eisenstadt's "couple of days" stretched ever longer as they took their prize apart bit by bit, arguing and discussing each new discovery. Off to the side, largely ignored, Calandra and Shepherd Zagorin and I waited... and speculated quietly among ourselves whether giving Eisenstadt the drone might have been part of a thunderhead plan to distract him from whatever it was about the Cloud that they seemed determined to hide. We waited three weeks... until, finally, Eisenstadt decided he was ready.