Once there, one member of the group planted a flag in the ground, while the rest grumbled and mumbled among themselves, then returned to their platforms. A moment later, the entire vast assemblage burst into frenzied activity as the Tolians made camp.
“They were deciding where to put the head table,” said Dr. Melville Grant.
Harry turned to see the older man smiling at his confusion. Grant was at least sixty and his serene figure seemed to radiate dignity. Harry wondered if it had come with age or if he had always looked that way. Was it something one could learn, or did you have to have it in your genes?
“Do they do that a lot?”
“Every night. It makes sense if you understand the central organizing principal of the Tolian culture.”
“And that is?”
Grant sighed, then it seemed as if a small switch had been flipped somewhere turning him into a live version of an on-line voice. “The Tolian civilization was very sophisticated before it fell apart. A sophisticated culture can develop quite a complex reaction to a traumatic event—especially an event on the scale of a planetary ecological collapse. I assume you saw the runners and scouts and advance parties.”
“Yes. Are they like that with everyone or should I have taken it personally?”
He laughed. “Don’t take it personally. They’re all familiar with tourists and don’t have much to do with them. And even though you and I can understand them through the local net,” he said, tapping his ear, “they do not have the same capability. So they cannot understand what you or I say unless we use a hard terminal as a translator.”
“I feel better then.”
“Now, did you notice what the advance parties were doing?”
“Hunting and gathering from the look of it. Quite a fall from grace for a technological race.”
“It would appear that way—but only on the surface. True, they were hunting and gathering. But the organizing social force behind the activity is much more sophisticated. The social hierarchy of each Tolian prolat is centered on the leaders of the contra-grav platforms—a couple dozen all told.”
“The Tolian chiefs?”
“Close, but not quite,” Grant said. He laughed, inwardly, clearly at a private joke. “They are not chiefs, but chefs.”
“Chefs?” Harry asked in disbelief.
“Master chefs. Each of them is the heir to the combined knowledge of their clans—recipes for sauces, appetizers, main courses, soups, desserts. The menus of each family are maintained and protected as the Tolians wander across their barren world.”
“And the hunters and gatherers?”
“They are looking for the ingredients of each night’s menu. The master chefs send them searching for the spices, vegetables, game, and fruit that they need to prepare their selected dishes. It’s much more difficult and labor-intensive than simple hunting and gathering. Added to the challenge is the current state of the ecology. In order to support this number of Tolians, the tribes have to move more than forty kilometers a day.”
“No wonder the runners ignored me,” Harry said. “They were too busy to waste time gabbing with strangers.”
“Exactly.”
The feast was more than anything Harry could have imagined.
Within an hour, the tables were filled with food, though none of it was identifiable as more than soups, stews, breads, meat, vegetables, and sauces. Not that it mattered.
The range of tastes was like a symphony. The eating went on for hours and hours. Harry found it impossible to keep track of the competition among the chefs despite Grant’s best efforts to provide a play-by-play commentary. In the end, however, there was no hiding the winner.
One of the minor chefs from a table at the far end of the assembly was rousted from his seat, paraded around in the center of the encampment, and awarded a pennant of black and gold, which he wrapped around his waist before returning to his place.
After that ceremony, the gathering slowly dissolved, with the chefs leading their parties back to their platforms and the torches sputtering out one by one.
Harry pulled himself to his feet with some difficulty and walked uncomfortably out into the desert. After a while, he looked up into the night. Here, away from the torches and the smoke from the camp fires, he could see the full blaze of stars that filled the sky.
This was not the meek sky of his home world, wrapped by dark clouds of dust that shielded the full glory of the Milky Way Galaxy. Naverly Tol was much closer to the hub of the Galaxy and high above its central plane. The galactic core was a soft yellow glow that filled a quarter of the celestial dome, while the dark dust clouds, pale glowing nebulae, and clusters of young blue stars that marked the spiral arms unwound to the north and south.
Harry found himself staring up into the astronomic depths until his neck burned and his eyes watered.
“Quite a view, isn’t it?”
Grant’s voice startled him out of his reverie and pulled him back to the surface of the planet.
“You have a talent for understatement,” Harry said.
“I’ve been told that.”
“Any idea how far we are from Boston?”
“That’s a difficult question to answer,” Grant said, kicking a rock across the gravelly desert floor. “It depends on your philosophy. Rik science says that distance is simply a mathematical illusion that can be overcome with some technological sleight of hand. The Tolians, on the other hand, have a view of time and space that is difficult to grasp. They never stay in one place long enough to acquire a sense of here and now. And yet their entire existence consists of repeating the same rituals of hunting, cooking, and dining over and over again. The combination of static time and constant motion makes for a unique view of the world.”
“I can see that,” Harry said, looking up in time to catch sight of a shooting star. “Judging from a strictly personal point of view, taking the transit here didn’t involve travel at all.”
“Exactly. When you study a variety of cultures, you come to realize that every way of looking at the world is artificial and in some fundamental way, wrong and incomplete.”
“I guess I’ve felt that way more than once in my life,” Harry said.
“One thing for certain, the transit technology will radically change how the human race thinks of time, space, and travel. And sooner than most people realize—if we are successful.”
Harry felt a moment of disorientation. Dr. Grant had just stepped across the line from innocent discussion to conspiratorial plotting—and Harry realized abruptly that he was mostly unaware of the dimensions of the conspiracy and the plot. He kept his ignorance to himself and made an innocent, but leading reply.
“Yes, there is that,” he said, hoping that he sounded like he knew what they were talking about.
In the starlight, Harry could see Grant slip a rik-sack from his shoulder, step closer, and hand it to him.
“Here it is,” he said. “You realize how important this is, don’t you?”
Harry froze. A moment’s hesitation was all it took.
“Or do you?” Grant asked.
“To tell you the truth, Victoria didn’t explain much to me.”
“In that sack is a portable transit device. I assume she told you that you were to bring it back to Earth.”
Harry felt a chill run up his spine. “Yes, that much was explained. I’m not sure I understand how it got here, though.”