Careful.
The landscape flashed by at eye level. This was better than the ride through the sky he’d taken in his youth. So low to the ground, the speed was exhilarating.
This isn’t real. I want to go even faster.
Your simulation is comprehensive. You can and will crash.
All right, I’ll slow down. Where am I?
You’ve driven about ten leagues from the site.
In how long?
The clock time on this internal simulation is ten point three seven minutes. Of course, barely an eyeblink has passed externally.
I could circle the Redlands in a day, he thought in amazement.
People frequently did. It was considered a fine holiday outing. There were waypoints with vistas or with eating and drinking establishments. There were inns where visitors could stay for an evening before returning to the Valley. This was the parking lot of such an establishment. The edifice itself is under a nearby sand drift. And, as I mentioned, some of the more affluent built houses in the Redlands for recreational use.
Like a garden plot or a steam house.
Precisely.
But a hundred leagues away.
More, if they wished to fly. There are self-contained dwellings-vacation homes-scattered all over the planet. Most were merely a patch of remains on the landscape at the time I completed my orbital survey. Duisberg has a harsh environment by human standards. It has a comparatively large iron-nickel core that is highly magnetized and extremely active plate tectonics. This is another reason that Zentrum’s plans are erroneous. He is incapable of integrating the entire range of facts simply because he is not a fast enough, big enough computer.
And you are?
Yes. I am a generation past Zentrum, and my capacity is based on quantum gravitational physics. His is a spin-physics-based mind. Highly serviceable for the tasks he was intended for: planetary defense, traffic direction, weather calculations, and such. But not amenable to the Seldonian calculus and its subsequent application in psychodynamic topography. But this is academic.
Abel had hardly been listening, but was coursing down a hillside at the fastest speed he felt he could safely muster, flying over shrubs and pricklebushes, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake, tearing forward, hugging the landscape-and completely exhilarated.
We’ll get this back? Driving? When the Republic shows up?
Rapid individual conveyance is a building block of technological civilization.
So this or something like it?
Yes.
But this is as close as I will ever get. Simulation.
Yes.
Then, thrice-damn it all, take me back. Set me free from this dream, or I’ll want to drive forever.
He was back in the valley of execution. The wind touched his face again, and the sun-baked skin of the dead flapped in the breeze.
He went to the end of one of the execution stones and kicked it, hard. Dust fell away, a few stones. He kicked it again.
The shine of chrome glinted through.
Silver knife.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said to no one in particular.
The expedition moved on. Abel debated routing most of his squads around the area but in the end decided to bring them through it. He doubted these men would take fright. It was more likely the case that such a site would create only more resolve in them to get the job done and get home with the information.
They avoided fighting whenever possible, but they could not avoid the fact that half the desert dwellers knew that they were there, somewhere out there, even if they didn’t know precisely where the Scouts were at any given moment. This meant that they had to keep moving at all times and must take a circuitous trail that had subterfuge as its object as much as reconnaissance.
They had brought along enough food, but there was the constant need to find water. The men of the Delta proved to be the better of the water finders. Some of them used dowsing rods to lead them, but the best of them merely looked at the landscape and predicted where they would find a sink, a tanaja, or even the occasional slow burbling spring.
The Delta men possess this particular skill because they spent childhood around water, said Center. There is, for example, water everywhere in the tendrils of the River’s final journey into the Braun Sea. Some have been sailors and fishermen, or knew people who were.
The only fishermen that Abel had ever met were the stock fish growers who tended the carp pens on the far side of Lake Treville.
For food, they had hardtack and pickled dakbelly for almost every meal. Occasionally they slaughtered a weaker dak from the train to divide among themselves. This proved very useful in both feeding them and reducing their footprint across the land.
Abel had to admit that this was far from the lightweight expeditions the Scouts usually engaged in. It was more like the movement of an army, and Abel was learning valuable lessons every day about what a packtrain could and could not be made to do.
Mostly, it could not be made to leave no sign of its passing. While he drove his Scouts onward at what would have been a breakneck pace for an army, he could not help but feel that a malevolent eye was upon him, that someone was slowly working out from sightings here, spoor left there and there, his exact location-or at least a fix on his position that was close enough to permit attack.
He was determined to see it coming, if so, and disbursed the Scouts to the farthest limits he believed advisable, communicating by one-flag wigwag the simple instructions they would need for the day.
He’d skirted the Redlands, stayed alive and relatively intact, and managed to roughly count concentrations and resources of ten nomad groups. The one consistency among them alclass="underline" they were Blaskoye vassals now. They may be Tamers and Jackflits and Wei Weis and Miskowskis still, but within each encampment were a group of outsiders, men who were not Tamers or Jackflits or Wei Weis or Miskowskis. They wore the Blaskoye white, and in several instances Abel or his Scouts had observed these men beating, and even once dragging to death, a local tribesman.
These were subjugated peoples, and the men in white were their overseers.
And then it was time to use Gaspar to lead them to the Great Oasis, the prime watering hole, believed to be one of two or, perhaps, three, that the Redlanders possessed on the Eastern side of the Valley. On the western side, there were no oases at all, and precious little water to be had anywhere. So Center’s orbital survey had confirmed prior to the crashlanding of the capsule that had brought him and Raj to Duisberg.
Which is why Redland strength has always concentrated in the west, Center said. We will confirm the specifics in Lindron when we get there.
When are we going to Lindron? This was entirely news to Abel.
I am waiting for a series of dependencies to resolve, said Center. I assure you, you will be the first to know, Abel Dashian.
Thanks.
I suggest you concentrate on resolving the most pressing of those dependencies at the moment.
What would that be?
When and where the Blood Winds will begin to blow. Every indication is that it will be sooner rather than later.
5
Observe: