“You know,” said Orro, turning a joint of dried meat on the embers with a stick, “we now have no evidence of what happened. It could all have been a dream.”
“We have the tapes,” said Kwarive.
“The Might has the tapes,” said Orro. “I am certain we shall never see them again.”
“Too right,” said Nollam. “Markhan’s stashed them in a safe in his office.”
“There’s still the Object,” said Darvin. “And the third moon. Speaking of which.” He turned to Nollam. “Something you and Markhan said, about the third moon having to be in the sky?”
“We did, did we?”
Darvin ignored the ploy. “Which means that the ether waves used in teleltinematography are line-of-sight only.”
“I couldn’t say,” said Nollam. “Here, Orro, pass me that meat. The smell’s making me dribble.”
He bit off a chunk of the fragrant meat and passed the hunk to Kwarive. It made its way around the circle, becoming gnawed to the bone. Darvin laid the bone at the edge of the fire, alert for the sound of a crack that would let whoever snatched first get at the marrow.
“I wonder,” he said, staring up at the rising sparks, “what practical use a line-of-sight communication system could have. One even more unwieldly than wireless telephony, and without its range and versatility. Pictures, yes — but if it’s only line-of-sight, what’s wrong with a telescope?”
“Forward artillery spotting,” said Orro. “Among others. Or so it is said in Gevork.”
“Let your fancies run free,” said Nollam. “I’m not telling you a thing. Mind you, they do have some sharp thinkers over there in the Realm. So it’s said.”
Darvin saw out of the corner of his eye a red glint in the sky and thought it was the landing-light of the airship they awaited, but as he looked up he saw it was only the gleam of the fire reflecting off the tethered blimp. It reminded him of the etheric reflection off the third moon. That passing thought stirred the same obscure excitement in his mind that he’d felt the day he’d invented the wind tunnel, and failed to invent the aeroplane.
He rocked forward on his haunches. Orro’s hand darted for the bone, then returned it disappointed. Darvin twitched his lips at his friend and stood up and walked slowly away into the dark. This time, he was determined not to let whatever insight he’d glimpsed flash away like a fish. Once outside the firelight he could see the stars, and the underside of the blimp. He sprang into the air and flapped upward, and turned. He soared above the fire — his friends looked up and called out — then began circling it, climbing in the warm thermal updraught until he was almost at the height of the blimp. He flew back and forth above the quiet, busy camp. Flying helped him to think, and there was objectivity in that view from a height. Height! That was it! Height and sight! He dropped.
He landed beside the fire in a whoosh of wings and a flurry of smoke and ash.
“Hey!” complained Kwarive, fanning the air in front of her eyes.
“Sorry.” Darvin settled beside her, put a wing around her, and spread the other wing and both hands before the fire to feel the warmth.
“What was that all about?” asked Nollam, who had meantime won the bone.
“Just a thought,” said Darvin. “One that might occur to a bright young tech like yourself. An idea that could get a man noticed.”
Nollam sucked a greasy finger and regarded him. “I’d be interested.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Darvin. “Maybe I’ll keep it to myself. Guard it, you might say, like some tasty morsel.”
Nollam tossed him the charred femur. “There’s some left.”
With a show of gallantry Darvin handed it to Kwarive.
“All right,” he said. “Far be it from me to pick your brains for military secrets. But the marrow of the thing, one might say, is point-to-point, line-of-sight communication. Hilltop to hilltop, like beacon fires. Now, I don’t ask you to say that’s what it is. All I’m saying is, if that’s all the Might is using it for they’re missing a trick.”
“Go on,” said Nollam, ears pricking.
“Today the message from the sky was received over a wide area, or so Markhan gave us to suppose. By receivers that were nowhere near within sight of each other.”
“They were all within sight of the third moon,” said Nollam. His ear twitched and his brows rose. “Aha! I see what you’re getting at, but we can’t put transmitters or transmission aerials in the sky.”
Darvin looked upwards, slowly enough to let Nollam track his gaze. The blimp glowed red above them.
“Can we not?” he said.
13 — Contact Clause
The summons had a priority override that lasered it through layer after layer of firewalclass="underline" from the No-Trace on the recipient’s location, through the Do Not Disturb aura around his room and several subtler obstacles in his head, to finally penetrate the last barrier, sleep. Horrocks woke with heart pounding and eyes staring. In the dark a ghastly hallucination of the Oldest Man blazed in front of him, demanded his presence, and vanished.
The jolt of his awakening had disturbed Genome. She rolled, mumbling. Horrocks caressed her shoulders.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Conference call.”
“Talk quiet,” she said.
Her fingertips trailed across his back and thigh as he pushed away. He split the side of the permeable cocoon they’d shared and drifted across the still-dark room to the utility wall. The cocoon sealed itself again behind him. He docked with his clothes while sucking a hot-enough coffee. Its dim infrared lit his way to the hatch. The corridor’s daylight strip struck him like a rush, its wavelengths rebooting wakefulness faster than the black drug. He finger-thrust the wall and launched himself along; grabbed a handhold outside the first unoccupied nook, fifty metres along; swung in, braced himself against its curving walls like a child between the trunk and branch of a tree, and closed his eyes.
The summons’s track-back pulsed in front of him like a migraine. He tagged it and was yanked into a hasty telepresence. Constantine glowered from the far pole. Eleven other people were already there, of whom Horrocks recognised two by sight: Awlin Halegap, the speculator, and Amend Locke, the science-team boss for the Destiny II probe. A quick scan of their tags identified the others as team members or brokers in terrestrials. All science and finance, then; and all crew. All except himself were old hands.
“Jury is quorate,” said Constantine. “We thank the youngest member for his prompt arrival, all things considered.” The spark of humour faded as fast as Horrocks’s surge of alarm flared. A jury! And not one chosen by lot! Whatever this was, it was serious.
“We must proceed with all despatch,” Constantine continued. “Not fifteen minutes ago I learned, to my great displeasure and dismay, that the Destiny II probe has made contact with the inhabitants. More precisely, the inhabitants have made contact with it, and it has responded.”
Shouts rose all round; if it had been a real space, they would have echoed. Constantine ignored them and flashed a file into common view. The clamour died in a moment of silent study. The first picture was a white rectangle unequally divided by a jagged, curving black line with an isolated arrow-like shape well above it, somewhere about the middle. On to the rectangle, a second or two later, a coloured picture was overlain: a planetary survey photograph. Blue sea, green coast, brown desert. The jagged line fitted the coast, the arrow marked a spot in the desert. The image zoomed to the spot. Under maximum resolution it picked out a dusty polygon of low structures, which on enhancement resolved to buildings and ramps.
“The sketch-map was the signal, and the spot you’re looking at was the source,” said Constantine. The view pulled back from the first picture to include it, as a piece of white card or paper, in a raw bug’s-eye view of two of the bat people staring straight into camera. “The natives are using our own surveillance devices to communicate with us. The response from the orbiter was this…”