Hugh smiled at the thought of how Rekchellet would have reacted to that remark. “We ground types can ride on the sweeper,” he keyed. “You’re welcome, too, Ted, but I suppose you’ll be more comfortable in the air. The distance is fairly short, and we could all make it under our own power, but it will be much quicker if we ride. Just a minute; I’m thinking like a glacier today.”
He left the group without worrying how the translators might handle the simile, and entered the warehouse, where he remained for some time. When he finally emerged, two other Erthumoi were with him, carrying a neutrino transmitter. This they settled as firmly as they could on the sweeper carriage, received Hugh’s coded thanks, and disappeared inside once more.
“Climb on!” keyed the safety chief. “We’re on our way, unless someone else has an idea we can use. You all know what we’re looking for, and my brain isn’t working well today.”
No one spoke up, and all but the Habra clambered onto various parts of the carriage.
“I’ll stay within hearing,” were the native’s words as he lifted away from the group. Hugh gave the robot a quick code briefing, and the machine set the sweeper carriage in motion. The Erthuma watched his Naxian and Locrian companions narrowly at first, but neither seemed bothered by a robot chauffeur. After all, automatic pilots were used by everyone; they had been steering aircraft and surface vessels, spaceships and wheeled carriers for all the Six Races, except perhaps the Crotonites, for ages. Artificial intelligence was something else entirely. Even the fact that this driver had taken verbal instructions could be rationalized; following a road was simple enough, even if the road might sometimes be blocked by a creeping hill of ice dust. They did, after all, have a sweeper with them, and neither the Locrian nor the Naxian considered the road’s slope a problem. If the ground changed altitude, they might have noticed if they were walking or crawling, but certainly not while riding.
Hugh gave no thought to the possibility of road blockage; he knew it had been clear up to the point where the truck had turned off, since the vehicle’s autodriver had given them no problem until then. Of course, something might have drifted into the way in the last hour or less, but that could be dealt with when and if. He was concerned solely with finding the turnoff spot, and had little doubt that the robot would be able to do so. Information from the truck had been adequate and precise.
Chapter Six
And Clearest Trails The Keenest Minds Misguide
“What’s the strangest thing your people see about star visitors, Ted?” Hugh asked when they were well under way. “Or would you rather not tell us?” For once, he had no ulterior motive behind the question, except perhaps an urge to learn something before his wife did.
“You don’t seem to expect to find each other different,” was the prompt response. “You appear to be— well, an Erthuma is surprised when a Crotonite thinks differently from him, and a Samian is surprised when a Naxian thinks differently from him, and so on. Even Naxians, who are supposed to read feelings, seem to be surprised at some of the feelings they read. You’re not blatant about it; consciously you do expect each other to be different, but you’re still visibly startled, even the Naxians, when it happens. Why? You’re from different places, with different foods and different comfortable temperatures and different ideas of what smells good and what’s polite. Some of you lose consciousness part of the time — you can’t seem to help it — and others get impatient about it and complain about the inconvenience to them. They don’t consider the inconvenience it must be to those who—’sleep’ is the word, I think.”
“But we know that we’re different, and allow for it!” insisted Hugh.
“You know it consciously. Somehow you don’t seem to know it down where your minds really work. It’s as though down below those levels where you know about your own thoughts, you’re sure you are right. That’s a little frightening. We’re glad enough to have you here, of course. We spend a lot of our time just keeping alive, diving to the ocean floor for mud to fertilize the continent and working out ways to take care of people whose farms are melting away on the sun side without being unfair to the ones who work to fertilize new land on the colder shore; but we’ve liked to think about causes and other abstractions as far back as our history goes. You’re certainly giving us new things to think about.”
“How far is that?” asked S’Nash instantly.
“What?”
“Your history.”
“Currently, three hundred twenty two thousand seven hundred seventy years.”
“Habranha years, of course.”
“Of course. We’ve been here and about the same for a lot longer, we’re sure, but every now and then records get lost during transfer from the melting to the growing side of the Ring, and sometimes records are a little ambiguous because nothing much has happened out of the ordinary for a few thousand years. The arrival of you aliens will help enormously with that problem for a million years or so, anyway.”
The aliens all fell silent as they tried to work out the time period in their own standards. For Hugh, it was not quite twenty thousand Common Years. A respectable recorded history, better than any Erthumoi world he knew of. But then, with a single planet-wide culture, what could happen to make history?
It occurred to Hugh that thinking carefully about the sort of mind now being displayed by Ted, who as far as he knew was a perfectly ordinary working citizen and not a professional philosopher, might answer that question. He’d have to make time for that later. He’d also like to arrange to listen in on a lunchtime conversation, or its equivalent, between a couple of Habras.
Or better, half a dozen if his translator could handle it.
Keeping to the road was getting difficult. Another snow squall was blocking vision for Erthuma, Naxian, and robot. Ted was, as far as they could tell, still circling overhead; whether he was above the blinding stuff or relying on his other senses Hugh didn’t know, and the wind at the moment was too loud to let him ask. Eleventh-Worker had made himself familiar with the packed-ice structure of the road itself under the drifts, and assured Hugh that he would know if they strayed off it; but the robot’s inertial sense was probably enough to forestall that. The way was known to be straight as far as the turn-off.
“I hope we don’t overshoot,” Hugh remarked after what seemed months of blind travel. The robot promptly answered the implied question, in spite of the presence of non-Erthumoi passengers. It must have interpreted the words as an order, missing the implications that the ability to do this might bother the aliens. Fuzzy-logic systems could do that; Hugh hoped they wouldn’t do it too often just yet.
“Seventy-four point three kilometers from the truck’s starting point by the shed is the road distance I was told. We have three point four to go.” If S’Nash and the Locrian read anything more than the literal information in the message, they failed to show it.
By the time two of the kilometers had been covered, the snow had stopped, but the wind had not. It was a biting, turbulent blast from their right — the south — which threatened at times to tip the carriage off its treads, had cleared every particle of loose snow from the road and left its solid surface visible to all, and was making it hard for the three living passengers to keep from blowing away. Above them, Ted was still flying, but his natural skills were being taxed near their limit and his strength even more so.
Every minute or two he would be swept out of sight to their left, to reappear seconds later as the wind eased a little.