The two old people sprang to their feet. Madame shaded her eyes and followed the girl’s pointing finger. A series of short double flashes came from a high wooded slope.
“It is the interrogation signal, as Fitharn warned us. Somehow, Sugoll has become aware of us entering his domain. Quickly, Felice. The mirror! “The athlete ran back to the brook where the packs lay and returned in a few seconds with a square of thin Mylar mounted on a folding frame. Madame sighted through its central aperture and flashed the response Fitharn had taught them: seven long slow flashes, then six, then five, then four-three-two-one.
They waited.
The reply came. One-two-three-four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
They relaxed. Claude said, “Well, they won’t come gunning for us now, at any rate.”
“No,” Madame agreed. Her voice held a touch of sarcasm. “At least Sugoll will meet with us face to face before deciding whether or not to burn out our minds… Eh bien.” She handed the mirror back to Felice. “How long do you think it will take us to reach the foot of the Feldberg? That valley we must cross, it is not too deep, but there are woodlands and meadows where les Criards may lurk, probably a river to cross, and the terrain will be rougher than that of the Fungus Forest.”
“We’ll count on Sugoll keeping his friends and relations under control,” Claude said. “And good solid ground instead of that spongy muck will let us keep moving right along, even if it is a bit steep in places. Barring any unforeseen balls-up, we might make it to the mountain in a dozen hours.”
“Our clothes are drying on the hot rocks,” Felice said. “Give ’em an hour or so. Then we can march on until sundown.”
Madame nodded in agreement.
“Meanwhile, I’ll hunt lunch!” the girl declared brightly. Taking her bow, she went running naked toward a duster of nearby crags.
“Artemis!” exclaimed Madame in admiration.
“One of our old Group Green companions, an anthropologist, used to call her that, too. The Virgin Huntress, goddess of the bow and the crescent moon. Benevolent, if you kept her happy with the occasional human sacrifice.”
“Aliens done! You have a one-track mind, Claude, seeing the child always as a menace. And yet see how perfect she is for this Pliocene wilderness! If only she could be content to live here as a natural woman.”
“She’ll never settle for that.” The paleontologist’s usually kindly face was as hard as the granite around him. “Not so long as there’s one golden torc left in the Exile world.”
“Thank you, Richard,” Martha said, smiling into his eyes, and with his vision still dimmed, she was beautiful enough and it had been very good between them.
“I wasn’t sure you really meant it,” he said. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
Her gentle laugh was reassuring. “I’m not completely ruined, even though strong men have been known to blanch at the sight of my little white body. The fourth birth was a caesarian, and these donks never heard of a transverse. Just slice ’er open down the middle, grab the precious kid, and pass the catgut and darning needle. It didn’t heal properly. A fifth pregnancy probably would have been the end of me.”
“The filthy swine! No wonder you, uh, I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t mind. Not any more. D’you know? You’re the first man since them. Before this, I couldn’t even bear the thought of it.”
“But Steffi…” he began hesitantly.
“A dear gay friend. We loved each other, Richard, and he took care of me for months when I was really bad, just as though I were his little sister. I miss him dreadfully. But I’m so glad you’re here. All the way through that horrid forest… I watched you. You’re a fine navigator, Richard. You’re a good man. I hoped that you wouldn’t be, revolted by me.”
He pulled himself up into a sitting position, back resting against a great hot boulder. She lay again on her stomach, chin on clasped hands. With her scarred belly and pitifully shrunken breasts hidden, she looked almost normal; but her ribs and shoulder blades were prominent and her skin had a translucency that revealed too many of the blue blood vessels beneath. There were smudgy shadows around her eyes. Her lips were purplish rather than pink as they continued to smile at him. But she had loved him with marvelous passion, this wreck of a handsome woman, and when something within him said: She will die, he felt his heart contract with an amazing, unprecedented pain.
“Why are you here, Richard?” she asked. And without knowing why, he told her the whole story without sparing himself, the dumb sibling rivalry thing, the greedy maneuvering and betrayals that had made him master of his own starship, the ruthlessness resulting in wealth and prestige, the ultimate crime and its punishment.
“I might have guessed,” she said. “We have a lot in common, you and I.”
She had been a Deputy Supervising Engineer on Manapouri, one of the two “New Zealand” planets, where extensive marine mining made up an important part of the economy. A contract had been let for the sigma-field energy-dome of a new township to be built six kilometers beneath the planet’s South Polar Sea. An Old World company sent its people to install the dome generator; approval of each phase of the work was subject to personal inspections by Martha and her staff. She had worked with the offworld technicians for nearly six months, and she and the project head had become lovers. Then, with the generator complex three-quarters completed, she discovered that the contractor had substituted certain structural components when a shipment from Earth went astray. The substitutions were rated at ninety-three percent of the capacity of those called for in the original specs. And everybody knew how ridiculously high those standards had been set, for Manapouri had originally been surveyed by the ultra picky Krondaku. Her lover had pleaded with her. To dismantle the thing and make replacements would lose them months of time, put the job into the red and probably get him the sack for authorizing the sneetch in the first place. Ninety-three percent! That dome generator would keep running in anything short of a Class Four tectonic incident. On this stable-crust world, the chances of that were one in twenty thousand.
And so she had given in to him.
The sigma-field generator complex was completed on time and within budget. A hemispheric bubble of force flowed out from it and pushed back the seawater for a radius of three kilometers. A mining village of fourteen hundred and fifty-three souls sprang up within its security, down beneath the frigid waters near Manapouri’s South Pole. Eleven months later there was a Class Four… 4.18, to be exact. The dome generator failed, the waters reclaimed their hegemony, and two-thirds of the people were drowned.
“The worst thing about it,” she added, “was that nobody ever blamed me. It was right on the knife-edge for the oi, Jtaalspecs, with that 4.18. I knew that the thing would have held if we hadn’t sneetched, but nobody else thought to question it. It was a borderliner, a tossup, and the thing had crapped out. Tough. The generator complex was so smashed up by the quake and turbidity currents that they didn’t bother with much of a fail-analysis. There was more important work to be done on Manapouri than dredge through half a klom of sediment looking for broken parts.”
“What about him?”
“He had been killed a few months earlier at a job on Pelon-su-Kadafiron, a Poltroyan world. I thought of killing myself but I couldn’t. Not then. I came here instead, looking for God knows what. Punishment, probably. My executive mind-set was all wiped out and I was completely switch-off. You know, take me, stomp me, use me, just don’t make me have to think… The stud farm setup I landed in after the trip from Castle Gateway seemed like a mad dream. They only take the best of the women for breeding stock. Those under forty, natural or rejuvenated, those who aren’t too ugly. The rejects are kept sterile and made available to the gray torcs and the bareneck males. But us keepers had fertility restored by Tanu physicians, and then we were sent to the Finiah pleasure dome. Would you believe there were lots of dopey broads like me who just lay there and took it? I mean, if a dame didn’t mind the basic shabbiness of being used, it was a hotsheet paradise. I understand that the Tanu women are better than the men when it comes to incendiary sex, but the men left no chime un-rung as far as I was concerned. The first few weeks were a nympho’s delight. And then I got pregnant.