He flinched, and a touch like wet feathers ran across his fingertips.
“What is it?” That was Topaz, alarm in her voice. He did not look up. If he didn’t do it now, he never would. He took a breath, reached deeper into his pocket, and closed his hand on a wriggling ball of damp fur. Trying to ignore its attempts to escape, he pulled the object free.
His instinct was to throw it far away without even looking at it. But the others were crowding around, wondering what was happening. He forced himself to reach down to the floor and open his fist.
When you could see it, the imagined horror looked small and harmless, even pathetic. A blunt gray head sat at one end of a multicolored ring of feathered fluff. Free to expand, little plumes of crimson and deep blue were gradually rising, opening into the shape of a badminton birdie. Josh couldn’t see any legs, but the creature was edging its way toward him.
He took a pace backward. He couldn’t have picked the thing up again to save his life, but he didn’t have to. Dawn was bending and lifting it in one smooth movement. She cradled the object to her chest in both hands, lowering her head to examine it more closely. The plumes were fully open, extending three inches from the domed back and gradually changing to lighter colors in the open air.
“What is it?” Topaz asked again.
“I don’t know.” Josh became less worried when he saw that Dawn was comfortable and relaxed. “I thought it was a plant seed from the balloon trees. Now it seems to be an animal.”
“Maybe on Solferino a thing can be both,” Sig suggested.
“Bothwell Gage told us differently.” But Josh realized that Gage hadn’t said that. Solferino, according to the biologist, was the only world other than Earth where living things like plants and animals existed; but it didn’t mean that an organism had to be either one or the other.
Meanwhile, Dawn was ignoring all of them. With her nose just a couple of inches away from the creature, she was muttering and crooning to it, or maybe to herself. Five seconds more, and she set off without a word for the building exit. Josh and the others followed in silence.
Dawn paused when she reached the cleared area outside the gym. She went down to one knee on the dense purple carpet of plant cover and scratched a clear patch with her fingers. She put the animal she was holding into the middle of the patch, and waited.
Nothing happened, except that after a few seconds the little creature set a determined path for the edge of the cleared area.
Dawn murmured her disapproval, reached down, and picked the animal up again. The blunt gray head lifted and quested, and the tiny trunk seemed to sniff the air. The body wriggled.
Dawn took no notice. She was off again, holding the animal firmly and heading for the gate that led out of the compound. Once into the forest of umbrella plants she kept going, moving uphill until she found a place where the leaf canopy was less full and Solferino’s reddish sun could break through to light the surface. She halted in the sunniest area and again reached down to place her little captive on the ground.
It lay for a few seconds without moving. Then an explosion of fine soil appeared on all sides of it. The body began to sink, surprisingly quickly. In less than thirty seconds it had vanished. All that was left as proof of its presence was a small conical heap of red dirt.
“Plant, or animal?” Topaz was the first to speak. “I guess we still don’t know.”
“We were told Solferino wasn’t dangerous,” Sig said. “We still don’t know if that’s true or not, but one thing’s for sure. There’s plenty here that’s strange and mysterious.”
Topaz took Dawn’s hand in hers and regarded her in a way that Josh found perplexing. “Very true,” she said. “The most mysterious thing I’ve ever met is right here.” Her smile at Dawn took any ill feeling away from her words. “And of all the things on Solferino, this is the one that I’d most like to understand.”
That was the end of the incident with Dawn and what—for want of a better word—Josh thought of as the balloon-tree seed. But in a curious way it wasn’t the end for any of them. Josh realized that later in the day, after Brewster’s rage at Winnie Carlson had died down and he felt free to go to the computer room. He had expected to find it empty, and was hoping to learn more about Solferino’s native life forms. Instead he saw the unlikely pair of Sig Lasker and Amethyst Karpov, side by side at one of the consoles. They nodded at Josh, acknowledging his existence, but otherwise they took no notice of him.
“More like this, I think,” Sig said. He was working with a graphics package, and he had drawn on the display a wispy plume with indistinct sides.
Amethyst shook her head decisively. “Then it’s not a FoodLines ship. Before we left Earth I studied everything I could find about the Foodlines fleet. Nothing has an exhaust like that.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s easier to say what it isn’t.” Amethyst was fiddling with the keypads. “This is really annoying. The data banks I’d most like to look at have disappeared. There’s nothing here about the Unimine line—in fact, I can’t find anything about Unimine at all, nothing on the franchises for Cauldron or anything else. Everything involving the Grisel system seems to have been wiped out.”
That was bad news for Josh, too. Solferino life forms certainly ought to be part of the Grisel system data banks. But Amethyst was continuing, “I’d like to prove that what we saw when we were in the lander, and what Dawn drew, are both Unimine vessels. But without data, we’re guessing.”
“How about what you think you saw?” Sig turned to Josh.
“I don’t think I saw it. I did see it.” Josh came closer for a better view of the display. “That sure looks like the same ship exhaust to me. What are you two up to?”
“Worrying,” Sig replied. “At least, I am.”
“What about?” Josh was worrying, too, but mostly concerning Dawn and the ruperts.
“This place. Nothing makes sense. We’re shipped off to camp in the Barbican Hills almost as soon as we arrive, before we even know our way around this compound. The whole computer system falls apart as soon as we get back.” Sig gestured at the display. “When did you ever hear of hardware failure and data loss that had nothing to do with each other? That’s what supposedly happened here. Then there’s Brewster. He acts as though we were dumped on him, without warning, and he’s just as astonished when Winnie Carlson shows up.”
“But he didn’t know we were coming.”
“Wrong. Not if you believe Sapphire. Right, Amy?” Sig looked to Amethyst for confirmation.
She nodded. “We weren’t the only Foodlines trainees, Josh. There were scores more. Saph saw a complete list when we were back on Earth. She says that Brewster not only knew we were coming to Solferino, he requested each one of us. We are what Brewster felt he needed.”
It was such an improbable idea, Josh had to ask a delicate question. “You say the person who saw all this was Sapphire. Was she—I mean, could she have been…”
“Stoned, and out of her mind?” Amethyst provided the words for him. “Some of the time she was, yes. She was when we first got here. But I know Saph. Zonked or not, this isn’t the sort of thing she’d make up. I’m willing to believe that Brewster didn’t know anything about Winnie Carlson; but us, he picked out. He knew we were supposed to come to Solferino. The only thing is, we arrived a week early because Bothwell Gage was available to drop us off. Brewster would have known that, too, if he’d bothered to check his message center.”
“He was away at the medical facility.”
“Wherever that is.” Amethyst touched the console pads again, and a familiar-looking message appeared on the display.