The Wave and the Flame Read online

  “Too bad,” Susannah agreed abstractedly. She preferred to ignore the Sleds, since a glance in their direction led the eye inevitably beyond to the shifting blue image of the ice. In those private moments when her nerves were most tender, when the bickering gave way to terse silence and the ice spoke in its language of creaks and groans, it was hard to have total faith in the impenetrability of an invisible wall. The ice was a more manifest power, pressing relentlessly inward against the shield, threatening the small space won by the heat of the Lander’s descent engines, held at bay only by a slim beam of energy whose source in the Orbiter might as well be a million miles away instead of a few thousand, for all of its current accessibility. The Lander was capable of a single round trip. Once down, the landing party must stay down, until they were ready—or forced—to leave.

  Well, I wanted a way out of the laboratory, Susannah reminded herself, but as always, her gaze was snared by the perimeter’s stealthy blue dance. In the field distortions, the ice seemed to sway and breathe. It wore a dampness like sweat where ice and forces interfaced. Susannah felt suddenly fragile, under siege on a giant hostile planet, battered not by alien dangers but by more familiar horrors: constant storms, wind, snow, ice and frigid cold. That the preliminary probe had predicted a hot, dry climate made this unrelenting winter somehow harder to bear. She turned away abruptly, back to the meager comfort of her tiny dried twigs, and longed for something living to study, something fresh and growing. She tapped a note into the miniterminal on her wrist and sat back, trying to recall what had seemed so important a moment ago, before the squabbling had sidetracked her. Stretching, she raked her fingers through her straight dark hair to readjust its length in the plastic clasp at her neck, and remembered. “I wonder what he wanted.”

  “Who?” Megan awoke from some icebound reverie of her own.

  “Whoever that was we heard at the tunnel just now.”

  “Yes, I wonder. Not like the Sawls to run around yelling.”

  McPherson snapped her manual shut. “Aw, Meg, be real. On the noise scale, they’re about a nine. All jammed into their little holes up there, yammering a mile a minute.”

  Susannah cleared her throat warningly.

  “They don’t yell at me, McPherson,” retorted Megan.

  Susannah abandoned persuasion for the direct approach. “I wish you two would work out your mother-daughter competition elsewheres.”

  Megan glared hopelessly around at the walls of crates and ice. “Where? Just tell me where else I can go!”

  “Mother, my ass!” bellowed McPherson. “My mother captained the Orion for twelve years! The fuckin’ Orion. You couldn’t get a better ship than that in those days!” She cocked her arm and threw the manual hard. As Megan ducked, the flapping plastic missile sailed past her shoulder and slammed into a curtain that closed off a corner of the work space. A moment later, the curtain was drawn aside. A tall white-haired oriental woman surveyed them with stem equanimity.

  “Uh-oh.” The young pilot clambered up from her recliner.

  The newcomer let the silence add dignity to her entrance, a dignity of age and bearing only slightly undercut by the earphone dangling discreetly from one ear. “Lieutenant McPherson, Dr. Levy: I am sure you are both aware of how well sound carries in these denser atmospheres. I see no need for raised voices to make ourselves heard.”

  “Yes, Commander,” McPherson murmured.

  Megan shook her head ruefully. “Sorry, Weng. It’s just that…”

  “Yes, Dr. Levy?”

  “The usual, that’s all.”

  “Ah. The usual.” Weng moved to peer over Susannah’s shoulder. Her spotless white uniform hung loosely about her, contriving to make her thin body look full and graceful. She sucked in a parched cheek and poked at a sprig of dried blossoms. “Are we making progress with the Fiixian flora, Dr. James?”

  Susannah smiled up at her. “Slowly, Commander. Mostly I’m finding further mysteries in place of answers, so I’m actually grateful for all the extra time we’ve had here.”

  Weng’s opaque black stare glittered, a hint of amusement mixed with skepticism. “You may be the only one, Dr. James,” she murmured, as she retreated towards the relative seclusion of her corner and closed the curtain behind her.

  There was a beat of chastened silence, broken only by the ominous creaking of the surrounding ice. Then McPherson whispered fiercely, “She’s in there listening to her damn spools again!”

  “I prefer Bach to arguments myself.” Susannah polished her magnifier on her wrinkled shirttail and laid out another leaf for study. She thought she heard a low distant rumble, more felt than heard, through the soles of her feet, like the passing of an underground train, through her fingertips as they rested on the plastic tabletop. The wind’s come up again, she decided, though it didn’t really sound like the wind at all.

  “Isn’t it dinnertime yet?” Megan asked suddenly.

  McPherson snorted. “It’s only sixteen hundred!”

  Without looking up, Susannah murmured, “You know, Meg, was up in the Caves earlier today. It’s not so cold in the MeetingHall as it has been.”

  Megan’s mouth tightened. “You going to get on my back, too? Well, how about this? It’s not the cold this time. I’d be up there all right, but your friend Stavros is having one of his manic periods. He’s hogging the Caveside terminal like it was his personal property!”

  “Perhaps we should put in another,” Susannah suggested with patience she did not really feel. The Cave terminal’s nonavailability was an excuse they all used at one time or another as the lethargy of confinement stole over them.

  “Oh, I asked about that, but Stavros refused. He insisted it’s too risky to put our only backup on line, and he is the Communications Officer, irony of ironies.”

  “Speak to Weng about it.”

  “He’s got Weng in his pocket. I have a better idea. Why don’t you speak to Stavros.”

  The corners of Susannah’s mouth twitched. “I have no magic power over the man, Meg.”

  “So you say, but somehow you always get use of that terminal when you need it.”

  “Stavros is stubborn, Meg. You have to approach him obliquely if you want to get around him.”

  “He’s nuts,” offered McPherson cheerfully. “Sitting in a damp old cave all day like a mole with all that hardware piled up around him. A total obsessive crazy.”

  “Not crazy,” Susannah countered. “Just excessively gifted. Besides, it’s his first expedition. He’s busy proving himself.” Her irritation showed only in her faint blush. She disliked feeling compelled to specially defend her most difficult colleague. Dealing with Stavros was always a messy, ungainly business that left you more challenged than satisfied. His sheltered adolescence as a university wunderkind had not suited the young linguist for the intimate politics of a small scientific expedition. But Susannah admired his unjaded commitment, not just to getting his work done, but to the ideal of the work, to the mystery and wonder of language. Still, as Megan would readily point out, however profound his gift for word theory, Stavros Ibiá had not yet learned to moderate his behavior like an adult. It was just as well he spent most of his time up there in the Caves, out of everyone’s hair. “Meg, you remember how it was?” Susannah offered in his defense. “Your first planet is like your first love—it hits you the hardest. You think you’ I! never care as much about another world, or ever see the first as just one more in the string of worlds you’ll study during a lifetime.”

  Megan grunted. “And you with only three to your credit.”

  Susannah smiled but continued doggedly. “Why is he hogging the terminal this time?”

  Megan had recalled some unfinished charts to her sketchscreen and was toying with them guiltily. “He’s recording some major event just getting underway in the MeetingHall: music, tale-chanting, dancing, you know, the works.” At her friend’s slow look, Megan waggled both palms defensively. “Yeah, yeah, all the more reason to be up there myself.…
I don’t know, some days it just seems like masturbation.” Pain crept into her bemused frown. “Susannah, I have been working, up until recently. Six weeks I’ve been trekking up there and back, listening, watching, recording. I have a good book and a half’s worth of observations already and I can’t give it any shape.” Her plump hands flapped around like dying fish. “It just can’t be as straightforward as it seems in those caves. It can’t be so pedestrian. My publishers will have my head in return for their big fat advance!”

  “Well, the flora’s certainly not straightforward,” Susannah offered. “Perhaps when Stavros gets the language sorted out…”

  Megan made random squiggles with her lightpen that belied the seriousness of her tone. “No, it isn’t, I’m sure it isn’t. I just can’t find the key. Like when I called Liphar’s thinking ‘sophisticated,’ I meant ‘modern,’ really. I mean, it looks straightforward, like a grade-school text: your simple pretechnical society, handcraft—oriented, the usual priestly caste, the elaborate guild organization, what you’d call medieval in the old Earth sense, minus the feudal system. But I can’t… how can I describe this?” She paused, searching. “There’s no innocence in their eyes, like when you see a child on the street with a hundred-year-old face. The Sawls are… worldly, is that it? Nothing seems to surprise them, even us, dropping on them out of the sky. All my observations say primitive, but my instincts keep yelling, ’old, old!’ Yet they seem resourceful and, god knows, energetic, so if their culture is so old, what’s held them back?”

  She dropped her chin to her chest in an exasperated slump. “You know,” she continued, “Deep down, I just can’t help thinking that the real problem is me. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked with a living culture. I mean, maybe my talent is confined to excavations and artifacts. Bones. A little shard of pottery, a well-preserved petroglyph. Inanimate objects.” She pushed back her glasses, rubbed her eyes. “A stone hide-scraper isn’t going to mislead you intentionally by disguising itself as, oh, say, a water bowl. I mean, what in hell did I think I was doing, so late in life, schlepping all the way out here for the sake of one more book nobody’ll read!”

  Susannah set aside her magnifier. Megan was spinning herself deeper into the vortex of her depression than usual. “This is nonsense,” she began gently. “The Min Kodeh are very much alive and your study of them is considered a classic.” She paused, then added significantly, “As well as a best-seller.”

  “That was years ago, and the Min Kodeh made sense to me.”

  “But the Min are far less Terran than the Sawls.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem.” Megan smiled bitterly. “So close and yet so far?”

  “The Sawls will make sense to you, Meg. It just takes time.”

  “And we got plenty of that,” McPherson threw in from her slouch in the recliner.

  “Here. Look.” Susannah dug among her sample bags and pulled out two desiccated cuttings. One was bulbous and spiny, the other curled and delicate like a fern. “Normally, I wouldn’t even classify these two in the same subphylum, but Stavros assures me that the Sawls use the same word for both of them. So who’s right? Him? Me? Neither of us? Only time will tell.”

  McPherson hummed a soapy tune and slouched deeper into her chair.

  “Time is useless if you can’t even concentrate!” Megan returned. “All this snow and being cooped up all the time…!”

  “The snow will stop.” Susannah summoned her every ounce of conviction and presented the sad dry fern-thing as if it were a candle in the darkness. “This is the best proof we have that the sun will come out. There will be a spring.”

  But Megan preferred to remain inconsolable. She slumped into silence, chewing on the tip of the lightpen in her fist. The sketchscreen sat forgotten at her elbow. Glancing at it, Susannah noted block capitals scrawled in the margins of the meticulously arranged guild charts. Along one side the letters read, seemingly irrelevantly: “NO WEAPONS. NO WEAPONS. NO?” Along the other, filling the entire margin, marched huge letters reading merely: “WEATHER??”

  “Weather, yeah,” Susannah murmured, an unconscious echoing that undercut her own offer of hope. If this weather doesn’t break soon, both our tempers and our productivity will be shot to hell. In the silence, she heard the odd rumbling come and go again. The wind, she reminded herself. Just the wind.

  3

  The runner in the tunnel slowed as the grade steepened. His lungs sucked at the cold air in short hard gasps and coughed back puffs of pale mist into the near darkness. His gait was sloppy, his brown face wet with exertion. He had loosed the fastenings on his furs so that his heavy layers flapped about like sodden half-furled sails. He gripped the thong of his blue amulet between bared teeth to prevent its lashing against his chest. At a narrow turn, he tripped on a tongue of rock thrusting through the slick ice, caught himself clumsily, then pushed still harder up the slope.

  Ahead, smoother ledges of rock broke the floor ice, climbing in low wide tiers like age-worn steps. Pale gray light washed in to ease the gloom. The icicled ceiling grew steadily higher until, at the top of the grade, the tunnel ended in an arching portal of ice, drifted with heavy mounds of snow. The runner staggered into a high circular well bounded by white-crusted walls. A few large snowflakes floated across his dazed stare. He stuck out his tongue to catch them, then grabbed up a handful of fresh snow to quench his thirst. The deep well was open to the sky, its walls built of carefully fitted blocks of ice. Its floor was a flat white arena. In the center rose a giant conical rock, with a hole piercing its blunt tip. Beyond, opposite the tunnel mouth, a second neatly formed ice arch broke the curve of the wall to admit a steep flight of stone steps. Towering above the top of the wall loomed the sheer snow-swept face of a cliff.

  The runner stumbled through thigh-deep powder and gained the bottom step. He lifted one foot to begin the climb, then sank to his knees in the snow. Without pausing for breath, he threw back his head and shouted into the cliff face. His cry ricocheted upward, amplified into a roar of summons.

  The echoes died into silence. The runner knelt panting in the snow. Then a single voice answered, and a hooded face peered out from a ledge high above the runner’s head. He leaned back, squinting up the cliff face, and signaled with one frantic arm. A hundred feet higher, where the single steep zigzag of steps split to climb in opposing directions, a wider ledge filled up with inquiring faces. Embroidered sleeves flapped, fingers pointed.

  The runner could hear them calling to him all at once, and he waved again and bellowed louder, querulous in his exhaustion.

  On the lower ledge, the single face withdrew and rewarded him with the slap-slap sound of feet hurrying toward him down the stairs.

  4

  “There’s no damn coffee cups!” complained McPherson rattling around behind the head-high stack of plastic crates that walled in the galley area.

  Susannah winced as the top of the storage box slammed shut. Rattle, rattle, slam. Rattle, rattle, slam. “Ron!” she pleaded finally. “Have mercy!”

  “If you’d washed one the last time, McPherson, you’d have one this time,” Megan gloated. She leaned over to Susannah, a large intricately carved blue bead balanced on her palm. “Did I show you this? Our friend Liphar slipped it to me the other day in what seemed like a fit of concern for my welfare. For luck, he said—I think. ‘Khem’ is luck, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  “That word shows up about six times in the traditional greeting pattern.”

  McPherson stomped out of the galley, muttering, and headed across the work space toward the litter of dirty mugs on the uncovered Sled’s dashboard. She twisted her healthy cherub features into a series of quick frowns, imitating Megan so well that Susannah bent back to her work to cover a guffaw. It did not improve the working atmosphere of the Underbelly to encourage McPherson’s clowning. As the young pilot passed under the main hatch, she glanced up at the big square opening and smiled.

  “Visitor!” she call
ed out to the others, her cheer restored.

  Susannah sat back resignedly. “Seventeen hundred. The workday seems to end earlier every day.”

  Over the rim of the hatch, a neatly creased trouser leg appeared, then a second, and a face that surveyed the three women below with mock caution. “Is the coast clear?”

  Megan’s face sagged. “If it’s the Commander you’re avoiding, Emil, she’s busy composing.”

  “Isn’t she composed enough already?” At Megan’s answering glower, the man laughed, straightened and dropped gracefully to the ground. The fall of nearly four meters made landing upright a rather showy feat even in the lower gravity of Fiix, especially for a middle-aged man.

  “Forgot to warn you, Emil.” Susannah grinned. “I’m not much at setting broken limbs-mostly I do research.”

  “There is an elevator, Emil,” remarked Megan mordantly, nodding towards the central shaft that housed the Lander’s magnetic lift.

  “But that would be easy, my dear Megan,” the man replied lightly. “And boring besides.” The fine net of wrinkles from his permanent suntan smoothed into a manicured smile. The tan was fading toward a sickly yellow, but paler circles remained around his blue eyes where sungoggles had marked him with an owlish expression. He tugged his impeccable sportsman’s sweater into place and rubbed his hands together with relish. “Light I bring to your dull day, ladies, relief to your boredom!”

  “So who’s bored?” grumped Megan.

  The man grinned, unperturbed. “Monsieur Emil, le plus grand chef des dix-neuf mondes, will prepare a feast for your evening delectation!”

  McPherson cheered, balancing a load of coffee mugs between chin and forearm.

  “What did you fleece them out of this time, Clausen?” Megan inquired sourly. She shifted her chair around to face him head on.

  Susannah gave her full attention to the large twig that formed a scaly brown S against the white tabletop. Tilting at windmills again, Meg, she warned silently, as she watched her friend fall into her automatic pattern of assault on the expedition’s true power heavyweight. It was Susannah’s choice to treat Clausen with respect, the most pragmatic approach, since she then received the same from him in return. But as a beloved treasure of the Academic Left, Megan Levy could not let a megacorporate representative go unchallenged. Susannah suspected that it was only Megan’s newsworthy reputation (plus the corporation’s public relations fiction of government sponsorship) that had overcome political opposition and won the vocal anthropologist a place in the expedition.