They reminded him of embattled prairie Conestogas.
Only in this case, they were surrounded by jungle, and were merely three well-worn orbiters—spaceships only by the most generous courtesy—lowered to the crumbling gray-brown surface where they lay now, cradled in plastic-coated wire mesh baskets. And a triangular configuration was as close as they could get to a circle.
Nestled within, what was beginning to be the human campsite on 5023 Eris occupied the space left by the shuttles' backswept, stubby wings, which served as tents of a sort. They might be needed, thought Piotr Kamanov. The asteroid's organic canopy enclosed more than enough volume to support rain, and the humidity had been increasing since sundown.
In the jungle, beyond the geologist's night-shortened vision, something rustled leaves, some kind of animal life, he guessed, brought along to balance the great plants. Approaching the camp, he took his time, squeezing between the blunt nose of the McCain and the scorched tail of the Hatch, not overly anxious to rejoin his fellow voyagers. He'd bidden his nonhuman well-wishers what he hoped was a temporary farewell as one of their electrostatic craft, apparently the only mechanized transport on the asteroid, had left him on the ground to return "upstairs," walking the remaining distance, a matter of five hundred meters, to the human enclave. Rosalind and Toya had descended with him, but he'd urged them to hurry ahead on the strong, swift legs of youth, so he could be alone to think.
Kamanov's arm hung in the sling he'd be wearing, if he obeyed doctors' orders, another couple of days. It no longer pained him, and hadn't from the moment he'd been placed in the care of the insect-surgeons a level up in the series of complex structures built under the canopy. It wasn't his injury which filled him now with a feeling of weary sickness.
It was news from home.
"Pete!" Kamanov watched his friend Horatio rise on stiff knees, a malady of middle age he identified with. The general was hunkered by a tiny fire of branches and huge fallen leaves. As new as the alien colony appeared, the ground between here and where they'd dropped him already had a scattering of debris he associated with forests. Among their other uses, the growths were creating soil for the miniature planet.
His geologist's eye noted that the fire was built on an upcropping of iron-bearing rock, an obvious accretion feature on a world mostly composed of carbonaceous chondrites. He was also aware that there was no objective need for such a fire. No one was cold, no one was cooking, but he understood the primeval necessity. Toya huddled near, despite the mild temperature, as did others from the three shuttle complements.
"Horatio." Not quite recovered from his ordeal, Kamanov leaned, a bit short of energy, against the mesh basket under a shuttle wingtip. He waited for Gutierrez, but didn't wait to speak, nor bother keeping his voice down, despite the presence, beneath the wing, of a dozen figures curled in makeshift sleeping bags. "What is this nonsense they speak of at the infirmary, that we are about to declare war on our hosts?"
Two or three recumbent figures stirred. A faint, general muttering passed through the camp. Gutierrez shrugged as he met his friend and took his arm. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised that their grapevine's as good as ours. It's orders, Pete, straight out of an old B-movie: Earth versus slave-warriors of the Elder race."
"Orders?" Kamanov halted halfway from the center of the little compound, only pretending to catch his breath. Having become an old man, he'd long since discovered, offered one excuse after another for stealing time to think. He turned to look at his American friend, this time lowering his voice. "Washington's or Moscow's?"
Gutierrez blinked, deadpan, "Should it make a difference?"
Meaning, Kamanov knew, should you admit in front of this many witnesses that it does? Beyond the firelit circle he heard noises again, as if squirrels were rummaging for acorns among dried leaves. He took another breath, dropping to a whisper. "When they are such exceptionally stupid orders, commanding me, if I can, to murder—or be murdered by—sapient beings I have grown in so short a time to like and respect."
Gutierrez looked him in the eye, but refrained from contradicting him. For an American in this part of the twenty-first century, that alone represented fervent agreement with a politically dangerous opinion. They resumed walking. Within a few steps, they stood beside the fire, which threw grotesque, wavering shadows onto the flanks of the surrounding orbiters. The general thrust both hands into his pants pockets.
"If I'd known earlier they were going to release you so soon, I'd have stopped for you on the way back from my talk with Mister Thoggosh."
Kamanov surveyed the scene about the fire. Despite the relaxed postures and exotic setting, it had the look of a meeting, Empleado taking part, along with Estrellita sitting at attention. He often had to think twice before recalling that the redhead was Spetznaz, and a military security officer, at that, although at the moment she looked every centimeter of it. Several others added their silhouettes to the eerie shadows, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Sebastiano, captain of the McCain, Major Jesus Ortiz, Richardson's erstwhile second-in-command, C. C. Jones, supposedly the expedition's news correspondent, Carlos Alvarez, the cook, and young Danny Gutierrez, a mere second lieutenant but the general's son. Rosalind Nguyen was absent—catching up on needed sleep or checking on her charges, among them Richardson, Gutierrez's missing-but-accounted-for second-in-command—while Toya Pulaski, her occasional assistant, sat with her forearms on her knees, staring into the fire, stirring it with the meter-long skeleton of a gigantic leaf.
Watching everything and everybody from scattered points somewhere in the nearby darkness were Empleado's crew of KGB enforcers, blocky Demene Wise, Broward Hake, the oily one, the deceptively charming Roger Betal, and sinister Delbert Roo.
"The Proprietor?" Kamanov asked.
"None other. Pull up a rock. I'd just started filling everybody in, so I won't have to do much back-tracking on your account."
Kamanov found space, as usual—although he didn't notice it, himself—between a pair of handsome young women, the major and Lt. Lee Marna, a husky blond life-support tech from the McCain. Stretching full length on the ground, he cradled his head in his good hand. Campfire and flickering shadows sent his memories back a lifetime, to red-neckerchiefed childhood outings with the Young Soviet Pioneers.
Horatio must be right about the speed of informal communication among their hosts; this would be an attribute of all intelligent life. But most of what he thought of as "grapejuice" he'd squeezed a drop at a time from his own doctor and her aide, not their new acquaintances. As Gutierrez spoke, Kamanov understood that it had been hours since he'd returned from conferring with the alien leader, soaked in rapidly evaporating fluid but otherwise intact. Naturally, Gutierrez had been required to report Earthside, via a kilometer-long antenna lead, before talking to anyone, even the local KGB. This surely would have rankled Arthur.
But the geologist was most startled to learn that, following this initial report, each and every one of the expedition's half dozen department heads had been privately summoned to the mike as individuals, apparently to receive specific, highly classified orders direct from Washington.
"I was telling Pete," Gutierrez continued, "this Mister Thoggosh is the one Aelbraugh Pritsch called the Proprietor. And before you ask, we didn't go into it: beyond informing me he had stockholders to consider, I've no idea what authority he exercises. You have to see him to believe him. He calls himself a nautiloid, sort of a giant squid in a big colorful snail shell. He's preoccupied with some kind of search on this asteroid, but from what little he said, it looks more like a religious exercise than anything else."
He described the great mollusc as best he could, the medium in which he lived, something of his dissertation on alternative probability. It took several tries, with Kamanov's help, before everyone understood that, even in their own version of reality, nonsapient creatures similar to Mister Thoggosh had been supreme on Earth far longer than humans—even mammals, Kamanov told them—had so far existed. Conveying the length of time involved, hundreds of millions of years, they were almost required to start over.
"Such organisms dominate Upper Paleozoic strata," the geologist added, "but may be found, in one morphology or another, from the Cambrian through the Jurassic. Unless, of course, one includes the famous chambered and paper nautiluses, in which case they survive even today. They are a hardy form, vulnerable only to whatever mysterious force exterminated the dinosaurs." He shrugged, not an easy gesture with his stiff shoulder. "But why listen to me—it is not my specialty—when we enjoy the fortuitous presence of an amateur, but competent, paleobiologist."
Gutierrez frowned a question. No such specialty appeared on the roster. The major and several others looked to the general. His son glanced from Toya to the blond lieutenant and back again, there being little about Toya to hold his interest. Like his henchmen, Empleado glared suspiciously at everyone, frustrated, it seemed to the Russian, that he couldn't glare suspiciously at himself, as well. In the silence, Kamanov heard that rustling again, from outside the encampment. He could tell from their expressions that the others heard it, too.
"Toya is perhaps too modest to inform you of the fine conversation we enjoyed on this very topic in the infirmary. An intrepid fossil hunter and collector in her girlhood, she remains a part-time delver into the past even now. She identified those beings—whom most of you Americans, through ideologically colored glasses, seem anxious to view as soldier-slaves—as descendants of sea-scorpions."
Empleado gave the Russian a sharp glance which he may have believed no one else noticed. KGB or not, however, he'd learned that there was little he could do to restrain the geologist.
"How about it, Pulaski?" Sebastiano stroked his goatee. "A zinky for your thoughts." Faces turned to look at the girl. The expression, originally meaning debased American coins of the lowest denomination, was now applied in common currency to kopecks, as well, just as dollars and rubles were often and interchangeably called "ferns," in reference to unsecured banknotes once issued by the long-defunct Federal Reserve system. Toya kept her eyes on the fire and cleared her throat as her thin, nervous hands wrung the end of the fire-stirring stick she held.
"On Earth—our Earth, sir—sea-scorpions were crustaceans which, in normal history, followed nautiloids as the dominant life-form. The soldiers evolved from them, as we did from primates." This evoked muttered comments, nothing intelligible enough to reply to. She stopped, her small supply of courage consumed by what had been, for her, a terrible effort.
"You see." Kamanov smiled. "Not so difficult." To Gutierrez: "What did I tell you?"
Gutierrez looked down at the fire with a hand over his mouth. The geologist had no way of knowing that the general was torn, as he'd been for his entire acquaintance with Kamanov, between exasperation and amusement at his friend's instinct for treating women of all shapes and ages in a manner which attracted them like a magnet. That the attraction was quite mutual had no doubt made his life very interesting. Kamanov turned to Pulaski. "Explain the rest of your remarkable theory, if you will, Toya."
"Doctor Kamanov!" she protested in a hoarse whisper, blushing and pleased by his encouragement, if not by his having made her the center of attention. "I'm so embarrassed!"
"Not as much as I have embarrassed me," the reclining Kamanov lifted his good hand, palm up, in a half-shrug, "by not thinking of it myself." The casual motion assumed more ominous proportions, exaggerated in a huge serpentine shadow on the fuselage behind him.
Grinning into the flames, Sebastiano peered at Kamanov where he lay between the two good-looking women. "We can all see how embarrassed you are, Pete." He looked around the fire. "Poor guy must've had something else on his mind at the time."
In the laughter that followed, Pulaski reddened further. "I, that is, Captain, they . . ." Her voice trailed off in bashful paralysis.
"What the hell's wrong with you, Pulaski?" snapped the major. "Spit it out!" Estrellita must be as nervous as everyone else, Kamanov observed. She was usually a good deal more patient with the shy little sergeant.
A fist-sized flying something swooped through the dark overhead, underlit by the fire, and disappeared again into the jungle.
"What Toya is trying to say, Major—" Kamanov ran fingers through his shaggy white hair, as if even he found her idea staggering "—and I remind you it is her idea, is that we see here creatures not from one alternative world but from several, perhaps dozens."
"What?" Marna, the life-support specialist, let her jaw drop.
Danny whistled, then cut it off.
"Hundreds," the embarrassed girl stammered into the ground. "I've seen beings descended, like we are from simians, the way Mister Thoggosh is from nautiloids, from cartilaginous vertebrates like sharks." Her eyes jerked away, toward the shadows beneath the nose of the Hatch. The night-flapper had confirmed Kamanov's theory about animal life on the asteroid. As the evening cooled, he surmised, whatever he'd heard earlier was being attracted to the warmth of the fire. Pulaski shivered, huddling closer to the coals.
"Do not forget," he added, trying to distract Toya from her fear, "those who patched me up. All who see them believe they might be insects."
Gutierrez agreed with what he heard. "How about the ever-popular Aelbraugh Pritsch? Nobody seems to know what he's descended from. I'd be surprised if he does, himself."
"Some flightless avian, I'd guess, or dinosaur, sir. I'm not certain which, or that it even matters, given the warm-blood hypothesis." Toya had surprised everyone but Kamanov by speaking up again. As she warmed to her subject, some of her shyness seemed to slough away. "I'd be surprised if there weren't at least one true fish species, living in the same environment as Mister Thoggosh. Of course, I've seen two or three creatures I couldn't recognize at all. Sir."
"What gets me," Reille y Sanchez sounded calmer, yet still edgier than Kamanov was used to finding her, "is that every individual, all these other species, refer to the nautiloids, molluscs, cephalopods, whatever they are, as `Elders.' With a deference I'm beginning to find—"
"The nautiloids," Gutierrez interrupted, "do give the impression of being wise and ancient. Mister Thoggosh certainly did."
"Wise and ancient," Empleado snorted, "when their notion of terraforming consists of planting this runaway kudzu and letting it do all the work?"
Kamanov sat up. "Arthur, even someone with your obligations appreciates the absurdity of the labor theory of value. The point is—how did you call it, super kudzu? You Americans have such a flair for phrases. Whatever you call the stuff, it works. The plant is gene-designed to germinate in the airless cold of space, grow to a predetermined—"
"Enough biology, Comrade Scientist," put in Empleado, "the point is, what do we do about these molluscs? Goddamn it, they're individualists!"
"Goodness." Kamanov widened his eyes in mock horror. "How shocking!"
"And even worse," the KGB man added, "they're capitalists!"
Kamanov laughed out loud. Empleado's men glowered. Gutierrez exhaled. "Down, Pete. Funny thing about that, Art. Mister Thoggosh described himself to me as a merchant-explorer. Yet when I tried to follow up on that, to make some accommodation between us, he regretted, on behalf of his fellow Elders, that in all conscience he couldn't trade with us. Not as representatives of the United World Soviet."
"We have become," Kamanov grinned, "the kind of kids our mothers warned us not to play with."
Gutierrez glared at Kamanov. "Lay off, Pete. 5023 Eris is rich in resources. I thought we might work them, sell the results in exchange for a claim. But the Elders didn't travel to this dreary place, Mister Thoggosh informed me, at great peril and expense—underline expense—with trade in mind. Whatever they find here for themselves will, they anticipate, just pay a fraction of their costs."
"They came," agreed Kamanov, "for a more important purpose—"
"Which they won't—" continued Gutierrez.
"—perhaps cannot—" Kamanov interrupted.
"—reveal," Gutierrez finished with annoyance in his voice. "In any case, he explained—or he thought he was explaining—in the matter of trade, their ethics forbid them to receive stolen property."
"Meaning what?" Reille y Sanchez raised her eyebrows, then: "Did anybody else hear that? Some kind of scrabbling under the ship?"
"A peculiar attitude," agreed Sebastiano, "for a self-admitted capitalist. I heard it, too, Major, and I don't like it."
The general shook his head. "I've been hearing it all night, myself. Little animals, I guess. You'll find this even more peculiar, Juan." Gutierrez glanced at Empleado. "And try to remember Mister Thoggosh said it, not me. That's all—stolen property—he says any collectivist society, founded on `theft, brutality, coercive central planning, and murder,' has to trade."
The resulting silence lasted several heartbeats.
"Then there will indeed be war." The Russian geologist was sober at last. "Although, as with many another war in human history, no one on either side seems to want it."