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183) [5/21/03 12:38:21 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Legacy.txt the equipment I need
on the ship, transfer the equipment you are delivering to the station, and
finish our measurements of nocturnal weather-born transfers."
The captain looked surprised. "Weather-born?"
Salap gave us a coldly smug smile. "My special surprise. We've learned much
about the storm that lies out there now, that chased us both around the Darwin
Sea, but never caught us."
"What have you learned?" Keyser-Bach asked.
"That it is alive," Salap said.
--------
*9*
By late afternoon, the last boatload had been delivered, and the captain and
Salap stood on the beach, staring out to sea. The storm had swung in close to
the coast again, thirty or forty miles offshore, filling the northern horizon
almost east to west with pillars and whorls of cloud arranged in spreading,
stacked layers. This close, the clouds had a scintillant quality, as if filled
with flakes of mica.
Shatro, Thornwheel and Cassir stood by the boat, waiting to be taken to the
ship. I stood beside Randall, a few meters from the captain and Salap.
"He still hasn't explained," Randall said in an undertone. He looked around
anxiously. "We should put out immediately or we'll be blown onto the beach or
the vine reefs. I'd hate to weather that bastard in any case -- but I'd rather
meet it at sea."
The captain motioned for all of us to join him and Salap. "We've been
talking," he said.
"We both agree that things can be finished here by tomorrow afternoon, or by
morning if we put our backs into it. We'll need to help rig and test the
equipment we just delivered, and then we'll --
" His words trailed off, and he stared at the storm as if lost in a dream.
"It never comes ashore. It sends emissaries," Salap said.
"Mansur, you have my infinite admiration, but I'd like to know what to
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expect," the captain said sharply, "in clear language."
Salap seemed to enjoy the captain's discomfiture. "The emissaries are small
fronts of cloud, rich with water and materials picked up within the storm
itself. Difficult to describe."
"How strong?" Randall asked.
"A few knots of wind. Enough to blow them in gently -- not enough to hurt the
ship, or rip up the fabric on the prairie." Fabric was what Salap and the
station's researchers had come to call the shiny brown tissue that spread over
the prairie -- and concealed the inner workings of the five types of scions.
"In truth, the storm serves many purposes. It stirs the sea, grows nutrients
like a gigantic bio-reactor ... and it controls the weather. For hundreds of
miles, there is no storm but the one storm."
The captain was torn between scientific elation, concern for the storm, as a
sailor should be concerned about all storms, and what might have been
incredulity. "A remarkable discovery," he allowed, "but I think I'll feel more
secure when we're all on the boat."
The captain returned to the boat before dark, taking Salap with him to arrange
the equipment and specimens aboard _Vigilant_. Shatro had been waiting for
this moment, and when
Randall was out of sight -- walking off the dinner Salap had prepared, a
dubious feast of unfamiliar bits of prairie fabric -- the three researchers
found me on the beach, watching the storm in its unmoving, ever-changing
grandeur.
"We have some questions," Thornwheel said amiably enough. He wore a roughly
trimmed beard, which gave his high forehead and plump boyish cheeks some
maturity, but not a great deal. They sat beside me on the mottled dark sand,
picking at the rough rounded quartz and granite pebbles.
"Matthew tells us you have little formal training," Cassir said. He gave me a
hard look.
"We wonder how little."
"Enough to get by," I said. Their expressions -- a little flat, with
unconvincing smiles --
forecast some sort of trouble.
"We're just curious," Cassir said. "We like to know who we're working with.
What you're capable of."
"I'm self-educated," I said. "Lenk school, but no secondary after."
"Shatro tells us you were lost in Liz for two years," Thornwheel said.
"Hardly lost."
"Liz is old and familiar by now," Shatro said.
"I never got _familiar_ with Liz," I said.
Thornwheel chuckled. "Our scientific paramours, right? Scholar's mistresses
... books and dreams of queens."
Shatro was not mollified. "What did you hope to learn? Without equipment,
without training
... We've been trained by Salap and Keyser-Bach. There are no better teachers
on Lamarckia."
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"I haven't been so fortunate," I admitted, trying to avoid the confrontation
Shatro seemed to want. "I spent most of my time trying to track the behavior
of mobile scions. Whitehats, vermids, but especially aquifer snakes..." I had
read enough in Randall's library about the kilo-
meters-long fluid-bearing tubes, part of which I had seen outside Moonrise,
that I felt I could hold up an argument for several minutes, at least.
"I tracked one when I was a second in Lenk school," Thornwheel said. "Never
found the beginning, and never found the end."
"I tracked one that was three kilometers long, at least. It dipped into the
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Terra Nova at one end..."
"What about the pink shells?" I asked, trying to get the focus off me and my
experiences.
"I never did see where they came from. Do you think they're remains of
scions?"
Cassir took the subject eagerly. "Whitehats," he said.
"We don't know that," Thornwheel said contemptuously. "Don't rely on folk
gossip. But we've never seen living things inhabit the shells."
"Salap says he's sure whitehats deposit them as soil enrichers."
Thornwheel shook his head. "They're the cast-off remains of vermids."
Shatro shook his head in turn, more vigorously. The third degree had been
averted, at least for now. He took one last shot at me:
"What did you learn that we don't know anything about? You spent two years
there -- did you
_see_ pink shells being deposited? Did you see aquifer snakes hooking up to
feed another scion, or water a silva bed?"
"No," I said.
"Nobody's seen any of those things," Thornwheel said. "There just aren't
enough of us, and too many mysteries."
Randall walked along the beach and joined us as the last ribbon of light in
the west faded.
"I'd like to try to reach Athenai on the radio, now that it's night," he said.
"The storm doesn't seem to want to throw much lightning now, does it?"
"No, ser," Shatro said.
"Maybe we'll get lucky."
Cassir got up and we retired to the small cabin the researchers shared with [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]