“Mixed messages,” Bard said, and made a gesture that caused his fellow Spacers to stop where they were.
“Let me have a go at this,” Ty said, “if it’s true they are related to me.” He strode forward several paces beyond Beled, stopped, and then pantomimed drawing back an arrow and shooting it in a high trajectory. He then pointed at the archers.
Immediately one of the Digger men, near the center of the group, turned to face the others and backed several paces away from them, swiveling his head to get a picture of how the formation might look from the Spacers’ point of view. He shouted something that, from this distance, could not really be heard above the sound of the wind on the rocks. The archers and the sentinels eventually responded, though not crisply. They clambered down from the high places and, on further exhortation from the leader, set their bows down and backed away from them.
The leader turned to face Ty and held out his hands, palms up.
Ty set his katapult on a nearby rock.
A second man now separated himself from the Digger group and began making his way forward, making reasonable headway but steadying himself on a pair of walking sticks. His head was bald and his beard was gray. When he drew abreast, the leader, who was somewhat younger, began ambling forward, matching the older man’s pace.
Doc set his grabb chair into motion. Memmie, out of habit, paced him, but after she had taken several steps forward, he stayed her with a hand gesture. “I will take that, however,” he said, and extended his hand toward the stick. She gave it to him and he tucked it under one arm.
Ty waited for Doc to catch up, and then began to advance by his side.
Some of the Diggers seemed keen to follow the action and began to creep forward, touching off internal controversies, and prompting Beled and Bard to move ahead as well. Through a sort of nonverbal negotiation, the two sides arrived at a deal where a total of eight Diggers — the two out in front, plus six more trailing in an echelon behind — ventured out into the open space to match the eight Spacers. Among the Diggers were some warrior types, keeping a close eye on Bard and Beled, but women and a child too. On the Spacer side, Ty and Doc were out front, with Memmie a few paces behind. Einstein, Ariane, and Kath Two maintained some distance while Bard and Beled, who were conspicuously armed, remained in the deeper background, split out to either side, respecting an unspoken agreement that they would stay out of weapon range as the Diggers’ archers were doing.
The two formations drew up within speaking distance, and looked at each other for a spell.
To the Spacers, the Diggers were familiar looking from old videos: they were rootstock humans such as populated the Epic. Genetically they were homogeneous. They were white people with blond or red hair, and eyes that seemed to have gone pale in the darkness of their caves. Their skin was fair by nature, but freckled by exposure to the aboveground sun. They were smaller than rootstock humans, but not so much so that any one of them would have seemed dwarfish on a busy street in the Chain. Except for Teklans and Neoanders, who had occupational reasons for needing to be large, the descendants of the Eves had also lost stature, particularly during the First Millennium. They had been slow to gain it back, even during the Fifth, when by and large they’d had plenty of room to stand up straight. These Diggers — at least the limited sample standing close enough for Ty to evaluate them — did seem uncommonly stocky, however.
For their part, the Diggers had more to gawk at, since it could be guessed from their reactions that they had seen little or nothing of Spacers. Ty looked unremarkable to them. Doc was interesting largely because of his age and his means of getting around. Kath Two, Memmie, and Einstein might have looked strange more because of their coloration than any genetic alterations. Something was definitely odd about Ariane’s facial structure. Beled, and particularly Bard, were to them monsters.
After a minute of sizing them up, the older Digger stomped forward a couple of paces and spoke in the pre-Zero English that all Spacers knew from the Epic: “Cowards who ran away, you are trespassing on a world that is no longer yours to call home. Begone.”
“This is going well,” Ty remarked to Doc.
“He is putting on a show of strength for the others,” Doc said. “Best let him. If you would, please?”
He issued a command that caused his grabb’s legs to fold, bringing it as low to the ground as it could go, and extended a hand. Ty took his arm and steadied him as he stepped off the robot and found footing on the ground. He planted the stick with his other hand, then cautiously let go of Ty. Then he advanced a step. All of these actions produced murmurs among the Diggers. Perhaps they had seen Doc initially as some kind of cyborg, but now understood that he was just a very old man. He walked several paces until he found a flat spot that suited him, then planted the stick.
“I may look five thousand years old,” he began, “but I am in truth a mere descendant of those you style cowards. Though I daresay you would take a more charitable view if you knew of the deeds that they performed during their long exodus. Do I have the honor of addressing one whose ancestor was Rufus MacQuarie?”
“We are all of that lineage,” the old man boomed.
“Then I think I have something that belongs to you,” Doc said. Moving deliberately, he pulled the stick out of its purchase on the ground and hefted it up until it lay horizontally across both of his outstretched palms. “Please accept my apologies for having borrowed it without your remit.”
Had the Spacers been able to watch all of the Diggers’ reactions at once, it would have yielded a bonanza of intelligence about the workings of their minds and of their society. That degree of mind reading was, in general, the sort of task assigned to Julians, so it could be assumed that Ariane’s moiling brain and avid senses were running full blast.
The young males seemed divided between a more vindictive group who wanted the stick of Srap Tasmaner confiscated immediately, and others of a more chivalrous turn of mind.
The group at large comprised a minority who were indignant about Doc’s expropriation of their shovel handle, but — more significantly — a majority who felt ashamed at the idea that they would take away an old man’s walking stick.
What those two groups had in common was that they took what Doc had said at face value. A smaller inner circle — the old man, the younger leader, and a woman of intermediate age who had stepped forward to confer with them — had the wit to understand that Doc was playing to the crowd, and not actually trying to initiate a conversation about the ownership of a piece of wood.
In other words, the Diggers were, as a whole, reacting much as any other group of humans might have done. Which was interesting and important data in and of itself, since much might have changed during five thousand years in the mines.
The discussion among the three leaders went on at some length and led eventually to an epidemic of head nodding. The old man squared off, sticks planted, his face set in judgment. The younger man and the middle-aged woman advanced toward Ty and Doc respectively. The man came to a halt two paces away from Ty, just out of the range where shaking hands or fisticuffs might become plausible. The woman kept on coming and took the stick out of Doc’s outstretched hands. This touched off a wave of fascinated reactions among the Diggers watching at a distance.
In a quiet but clear voice, the woman said, “Old man, you have shamed us with your words and obliged us to answer in kind. No hand shall be laid on you by virtue of your age.”
She stepped forward past Doc, sliding her hands together at the blunt end of the shovel handle, and began to whirl it around. Then with a decisive lunge forward she brought it down on the side of Memmie’s head.