“Good. Let’s get going.”
Jao was sweating. “There’s more,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Jun Davd’s been watching the ship through his telescopes. He radioed at almost the exact time our own lookouts saw the ground vehicles starting our way.”
A chill ran down Bram’s spine. “Go on,” he said.
“More of the environmental bubbles are detaching themselves from the stick-ship. They’re just boiling off it. Drifting down to the rim of the diskworld. And some of them are heading toward Yggdrasil.”
Part III
SECOND EXODUS
CHAPTER 10
“He went back for the Rembrandts,” a terrified assistant babbled. “He said he couldn’t bear to leave them behind.”
Bram shook the man into coherence. “How long ago?”
“About two hours ago. He took a walker.”
Bram released him. “The fool,” he said. “The idiotic fool.” He pushed his way across the crowded shuttle deck to the raised platform of the control section, where Jao stood conferring in low tones with the pilot.
The pilot turned a worried face toward him. She was a big-boned woman with brown curly hair, a member of Lydis’s comet-chasing squadron and, therefore, a crack flyer. “We’re ready to go,” she said. “We ought to lift off within the half hour or…”
She trailed off and glanced meaningfully out the arbitrary forward port across the pale ribbon of landscape.
“Is everyone else accounted for?” Bram asked Jao.
“Yar. The curator was accounted for, too, on our preliminary name check. He must have slipped away right afterward.”
“He ought to have been back by now. Unless something happened to him.”
Jao, without apology, reached past the pilot and punched a telescopic view of the plain into one of the screens. He adjusted the angle of incidence until he got what he was looking for, then refined the focus. Bram saw a thin haze of dust, its forward edge advancing, its rearward margin slowly settling.
“Less than fifty miles away,” he said. “They could be here in an hour.”
Bram checked the latches of his helmet before putting it on. “I’d better go look for him.”
“Are you crazy?” Jao exploded. “There isn’t time. If he doesn’t get back in time for lift-off, we’ll have to leave without him.”
Bram turned to the pilot. “Don’t wait for me,” he said. “I’ll keep in radio contact, but if I go off the air or if I’m late, lift off without me. Is that understood?”
“I’ll wait till the last possible moment, Year-Captain,” the pilot said.
“Don’t cut it too fine,” Bram said. He lifted the helmet to his shoulders.
Jao retrieved his own helmet. “I’m going with you. No argument.”
They squeezed into the air lock together. “Leave the outside door open.” The pilot’s voice rang in his radio. Jao nodded and deployed a rope ladder, but they didn’t waste time using the ladder to climb down; they let themselves drop, with a little shove to speed them on their way.
“This way,” Jao said.
He led the way across the field to where a helter-skelter collection of walkers and wheeled machinery had been abandoned. Boxes, bundles, and personal possessions were strewn at random where they had been dropped. Some of the walkers stirred nervously, giving the illusion of life. They had no consciousness, of course—they were just protein machines—but still Bram hated the thought of leaving them here on a dragonfly world. Though, he reflected, if a dragonfly tried to eat one, the walker would poison it.
“This one,” Jao said. “It’s Old Speedy, the one that won all the races last summer.” He checked the reselin tendons to make sure they were hard and taut, eyed the diameter of the central ball of muscle to see that it still retained sufficient running time, and climbed inside. Bram followed him through the flap, and Jao put the biomachine in motion with a slap of the reins.
The walker ran flat out toward the digs, Jao urging it on at a gallop. Bram twisted around for a look at the launching pad. The first shuttle was mounting the sky on a tail of fire. There were six more to go, with the approximately one hundred eighty remaining evacuees crowded into them. The life-support facilities would be strained, but they’d survive until they reached Yggdrasil.
A half hour later, the moon ladder came into view, with the stalled car dangling from it. The low, regular rubble mounds of the outskirts of the city lay only a few miles ahead of them.
“We’re running late,” Bram said. “Do you see any sign of him?”
“No.”
Behind them, another shuttle rose into the sky. It was the fourth. There were only three left to go.
“There’s his walker,” Jao said, slowing down.
The derelict walker stood spraddle-legged in a patch of loose gravel, its blunt prow facing the digs, not the landing field. There was no sign of the curator in the vicinity. Bram got out and examined the interior of the driver’s bubble.
“Ran out of power,” he announced to Jao. “He must have taken a walker that was already run down. I saw a few footprints. I guess he decided to walk the rest of the way in.”
“What was it that he was after, anyway?” Jao said.
“A collection of Rembrandt engravings.”
“You’d think they were germ plasm samples. Couldn’t he have holoed them or something?”
“He said they were originals from Earth.”
Jao looked nervously behind him. “There goes another shuttle.”
Their pilot heard him. “I think you’d better start back now,” she said. “Your time’s running out.”
“How close are they?”
“About thirty miles. They can probably see our shuttles by now. But they’re still sticking pretty closely to the inner rim route that their scouts took. So far they’ve shown no sign of veering inland for a look at us.”
“That’s because as far as they know, all of the goodies are still waiting for them at the digs,” Jao said gruffly. He turned to Bram. “Where would your Rembrandt lover have been headed?”
“Back to the sports arena, I suppose. That’s where he left the things he wasn’t able to carry.”
“Serve him right if he got left behind himself,” Jao growled, He made no move to start up the walker again.
“Bee butchers,” Bram said softly. “That was one of the names for dragonflies. Bees were another kind of insect. They lived in communal hives. Original Man raised them for a substance called honey that they produced. Some dragonflies learned to hang around bee yards and wait for the workers to return with their loads. They’d dismember the bees on the wing, Harld told me, until the ground was littered with bee fragments.”
“Like the way they massacred us in the arena,” Jao said harshly.
“Yes.”
Jao reached to the tiller. “You’re right, of course, chaos take it. We can’t leave the little fellow there.”
The walker unlimbered its long legs and in a moment was flying at top speed toward the oval of reflected moonlight that marked the central city.
They came upon the curator a couple of miles farther on. He staggered toward them out of the rubble, carrying a huge portfolio that he seemed unable to lift high enough to keep from dragging, even in the microgravity. Jao came jolting to a halt, and he and Bram climbed down. The curator stared dully at them through his helmet, his face gray. They hustled him into the walker and cracked his helmet, while Bram checked his tanks.
“His air’s, almost gone,” Bram said. “He never would have made it back on foot.”