Ecolitan Prime (Ecolitan Matter) (35 page)

“Great lights cast often equally great shadows.” From his first glance, Nathaniel didn’t care for the industrialist, not that he could have said why, but he’d come to trust his feelings. About people, intuition was often far better than reason, probably because it was based on whole-body intangibles and not just facts.

“You, too, have a forthright wit,” said Vivienne with a bright smile, “and a discerning eye.”

Nathaniel shook his head. “Not I. I am a man with a blunt wedge for wit.”

“You are too modest, professor.” Vivienne turned. “The Ecolitans, Kennis. You said you wanted to meet them.” Vivienne offered a smile and a head-bow.

“Kennis Landis-Nicarchos, at your service.” The local industrialist, taller than Nathaniel, bowed deeply to Sylvia.

“Enchanted.” Sylvia smiled politely.

“I am the enchanted one. I had no idea that such attractive Ecolitan professors existed, and an economist yet.”

“Nathaniel Firstborne Whaler, and I am most pleased to meet you, Sir Nichos-Landarchos.” Nathaniel offered a deep bow. “You must be most fond of blue.”

“A failing, I must admit.” Kennis turned back to Sylvia. “I could easily become fond of gray.”

Nathaniel suppressed the simultaneous urges to grin and break the redhead’s knees. “Gray is most becoming, especially upon the discerning.”

“How did you become an economist?” the industrialist asked Sylvia. “Such a prosaic title…”

“I found that there was far more substance in economics than met the eye,” said Sylvia.

“A woman of imperial substance. That I like.”

“Kennis always knows what to say,” added Vivienne. “And he is so charming. Everyone finds him delightful.”

Nathaniel refrained from differing. The term “imperial” hadn’t been lost on him, or the message. He glanced around the Unicorn Room, noting that the numbers had slowly shrunk. The two men in gray had vanished, as had Sonderssen and the Fuard and the Governor General.

“Now…Kennis…you’ll have to relinquish your attentions for now,” suggested Walkerson. “The professor has others to meet.”

“I hear and obey.” The industrialist bowed, then flashed a white-toothed smile at Sylvia. “Until we meet again…and we will.”

Walkerson guided them away from both Kennis and Vivienne. “Next you should say a few words to Laurence, there. He manages the Artos operations of the Bank of Camelot.”

The three stopped before a round-faced man with a short white goatee.

“Professors Whaler and Ferro-Maine, Laurence. The Ecolitan infrastructure specialists.”

“Laurence Karl-Abbe, pleased to meet you.” The banker smiled. “We actually have some numbers, and if you’d like to stop by in the next few days, perhaps I could assist your study.”

“You’re most gracious,” offered Nathaniel.

“I should be. We share a common plight. No one is totally comfortable with either economists or bankers. Do you know why we turn off the climate control in the bank after customer hours? Because reptiles don’t need it.” He gave a belly laugh.

“Do you know why losing a hand represents total disability for an economist?” countered Nathaniel. “Because he can’t say, ‘On the one hand…’”

“Enough…” said Sylvia with a forced laugh.

Walkerson shook his head sadly.

Nathaniel barely managed to retain the last names and faces as they circled the room and spoke and made small talk. Abruptly, he found himself clutching an empty wineglass and looking around a nearly deserted Unicorn Room.

“There,” said Walkerson, in a self-satisfied tone. “I’ve gotten you properly introduced to almost everyone who is anyone in Lanceville, and your jaunt tomorrow should take care of the rest.”

“I take it that this was the creme de la creme?” asked Sylvia.

“Precisely.”

“Thank you. It’s not the sort of thing we could have managed,” Nathaniel said.

“My pleasure.” Walkerson bowed. “My pleasure.”

Nathaniel managed to avoid rolling his eyes, at least until they were outside the Blue Lion.

Bagot had the groundcar waiting for them. “The Guest House, sirs?”

“Please,” offered Nathaniel, his eyes and detector scanning the area and both coming up empty.

He slumped into the rear seat beside Sylvia, shaking his head. “Receptions are worse than interviews.”

“Because no one says much? And tiptoes around everything?”

“Putting together a study is a puzzle. You need numbers, but the numbers you get aren’t usually the right ones. So you have to combine and analyze, and then everyone faults your methods. The people you talk to come in two kinds: those who are in charge—and they either don’t know the details or won’t say—and those who aren’t, and they’re afraid to tell you anything. So we dance around asking questions designed so that any answer will provide some information, and they dance around trying to provide as little as possible, unless they have an axe to grind, and that means the data is skewed, and we have to figure out how before we can use it.”

“You
are
cynical.”

He sighed. “Sometimes.”

The foyer of the Guest House was vacant.

“Do you have this feeling that people are avoiding us?” asked Sylvia as she started up the stairs. “It’s as though we have to be acknowledged, but that we’re not people, not really.”

“The way I felt in my audience with the Emperor when I first arrived on Old Earth.”

“Was it that bad?”

He nodded.

“You never mentioned that.”

“Outsiders are treated that way most places. It’s nothing new.” He opened the door to his room, but heard or saw nothing unusual. The bed was turned back, the draperies drawn, and the light on the bedside table on.

Nathaniel closed the door and paced across the room, noting that, once again, his case was not precisely where he had left it and that the closet door was fractionally ajar.

“More surveillance?” murmured Sylvia.

“To be expected.”

“What did you think of Walkerson’s little gathering?”

“Two things of interest,” mused Nathaniel. “The gathering was almost a teaser of sorts, and those present were mostly male, and Chief Walkerson did not have his wife with him—or a feminine companion.”

“Neither did Kennis.”

“I noticed.”

“Are you jealous?”

“I could be very jealous…except you’re free to make your own choices and you didn’t seem terribly interested in him—as interested as he was in you.” He paused. “I also enjoyed your comment about a warm welcome. Interestingly, there was no reaction.”

“Kennis wasn’t really interested in me. He also didn’t seem to notice when you scrambled his name. For most men, that would merit at least a quiet correction. He was more interested in delivering that message that said he knew who I was and feeling out whether I’d be interested in him.”

“Another indication that we’re part of a setup, but no indication of who actually created it.”

“You don’t have any idea?”

“He’s not in any of the background material. He’s not Avalonian, and not Imperial. We can ask around.” Nathaniel frowned. “I didn’t like him, even before he started flirting.”

“He doesn’t feel quite right. His come-on was too strong, and that bothered me.”

“Good.”

“Oh, Nathaniel…” Her lips brushed his cheek, then touched his lips, and her arms were around his neck. After a long kiss, she eased back. “You offer so much more than he does.”

“He owns most of Lanceville,” responded Nathaniel with a wry tone. “I own the clothes on my back, some few securities, and a little in savings.”

“I’m not after possessions. You should know that.” Sylvia frowned. “You said the gathering was a teaser.”

“I didn’t expect much more. The political heads of organizations seldom reveal much. You have to look at numbers, or count traffic or power lines. There were always hints about things here and there, but Walkerson was clever enough to let the hints surface, but never to let us hear the rest. And his forthright wife…?” The sandy-haired Ecolitan spread his hands.

“They have wives—a rather hidebound and traditional society, I gather. But she wasn’t there.”

“Exactly.” Nathaniel glanced toward the connecting door, still ajar. “We’d better check your room.”

“You won’t find anything.”

“Probably not…just like we’re not finding anything with our study.” He slipped through the door to find her room a mirror of his—empty, the bed covers turned, draperies closed, and bedside light on.

He looked up from the detector as Sylvia eased back beside him. Her fingers squeezed his free left hand.

“I much prefer you.” Then her arms went back around his neck.

A H
IGH
H
AZE
covered most of the sky, and the hot wind, bearing fine grit and bringing the odor of hydrocarb fuel and dust, blew out of the south. Nathaniel studied the waiting flitter.

“You forget how small these are,” Sylvia said.

“Small? This must mass eight tonnes. Some things I’ve flown…” he shook his head, and unlatched the turbine cover. “I need to preflight this. You can get settled on that side.”

Sylvia nodded and slid open the copilot’s door.

Nathaniel just looked at the craft for a long moment, then moved toward the port turbine where he undid the catches.

“Sir?”

Nathaniel turned his attention from the uncovered port turbine to the approaching pilot. “Yes, Jersek?”

Jersek fingered his trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. “Well…I just wanted to tell you. I would have been out here when you came, but the factor and his friend stopped by, wanting to know about heavy lift flitters.” The Port Authority pilot shook his head. “With all this flat land, we need to think about those? Anyway, wanted to tell you I had the tanks topped off this morning. If you’re headed straight out and back, you’ve got enough for that with a good margin. You do sight-seeing around George’s place, and you’ll want to top off there. Use the good stuff—there’s a tank buried by the windsock, and I’d let the pump run a moment before you put any in the tanks.” Jersek paused. “You know about the stub tanks?”

“Right—they won’t draw if the mains are below thirty.”

“She’s a good old bird, sir. Seen me through a lot.”

“And she’ll see you through more.” The Ecolitan forced a grin.

The Port Authority pilot and maintenance chief nodded, then turned and ambled toward the building that held his office and Walkerson’s.

Nathaniel methodically scanned the turbine, then fastened the cover, checking the catches. He repeated the process with the starboard turbine, and then used the pull-out steps to get to the rotor deck.

Sylvia had long since been strapped in by the time Nathaniel returned to the cockpit and began the checklist, murmuring the items to himself as he went through them.

“Sequencers…check….”

“Diffusor…check…”

“Ignitors…check…”

He slipped on the helmet.

“Intercom…can you hear me?”

Sylvia nodded, and her helmet bobbed.

“The red button there—press it when you want to talk.”

“I hear you.”

“Good. Comm freqs…set…”

Finally, he touched the port ignitor.

Wuuuffff…eeeeeee…

Once the port turbine was up and in the green, he started the starboard one, completed the checklist, then released the rotor brake. The flitter swayed as the heavy rotors began to turn.

“Rotors…engaged.”

He checked the instruments one last time, then triggered the comm. “Artos main, this is Port Angel two, ready to lift.”

“Angel two, cleared to the southwest, radian two eight five. Report the river on departure.”

“Stet. Two here, lifting this time. Will report the river.”

Nathaniel eased power to the thrusters, and the flitter slipped onto the air cushion. He air-taxied slowly until he had the old Welk clear of the Port Authority hangar. The Ecolitan swallowed back a touch of bile—the unburned exhaust gases weren’t wonderful for his digestion. With spacecraft you smelled ozone and hot metal, but not exhaust fumes.

From the copilot’s seat Sylvia studied the patched permacrete and the hangar walls that were an alternating pattern of old and new synthetic hydrocarbon building sheets.

Once past the hangar, Whaler added power to the thrusters and lowered the nose slightly, keeping the flitter on its air cushion as the speed built up. At one hundred fifty klicks, he eased the stick back and let the flitter climb.

From the air, the shuttle port looked like a permacrete X imposed on different-sized squares of varied green, across which ran the tan lines of the shuttle landing strips. To the east was the gray line of the ocean, a darker gray blot that was Lanceville, and the tiny blue dot that was the Blue Lion.

“Tower, Angel two, clearing the river this time.”

“Stet, two. Report the river inbound on return. Same freq.”

“Stet, tower.” Nathaniel eased the flitter onto the outbound two nine five radial and continued to climb, scanning the instruments. The heads-up display had long since ceased working—as was the case with most of the older Welk-Symmons.

“How far is the Reeves-Kenn spread?” Sylvia’s voice crackled through the earsets of the helmet.

“Two hundred fifty kilos, give or take a few—almost due southwest.” He inclined his helmet slightly.

Once past the river, the ground beneath began to slope upward, and to dry out, showing traces of grayish sand that grew more prominent with every kilo. “The midplateau desert, according to the maps.” His voice sounded scratchy in his own earset, and he hoped it was just the set. “Badlands…mostly.”

“They didn’t planoform it, so close to Lanceville?”

“It’s mostly lava of some sort—I don’t know the term, but it’s the stuff that you get on hotcore worlds with no oxygen and no way to reduce it. Give it a few thousand years, and it’ll be fine. Right now it isn’t worth the trouble.”

“People won’t wait that long.”

“Probably not, but it takes money, and that’s something in short supply here on Artos.”

The terrain below had become one of rough stone hills, joined by sweeps of gray sand. Nothing grew in the ocean of stone and sand where the only movement was that of wind-swept silica particles, not anything large enough to see from the flitter cockpit.

“Desolate,” Sylvia said after a time.

“Gives an idea of what Artos was like centuries ago.”

The sky was clear—and empty—like the desert beneath.

“Do you have any better idea why we’re doing this study?” asked Sylvia after a long silence.

“No. It’s getting clearer that the government in New Avalon wants something from it, probably for us to reveal something that they can’t afford to disclose and need an impartial source for. Either that or support for some program. They want to be able to say that it was Accord’s—or the Institute’s—idea. That means politics, and trouble. But I don’t know what they want, only that someone doesn’t want us to find it, whatever
it
may be. I’m hoping this little trip will shed some light.”

“You don’t sound certain it will.”

“I’m always a skeptic when you get to politics.”

His words drew a laugh, and he smiled to himself, even as the silence drew out and as he checked the nav screens.

“On course…beacon’s clear.”

After another stretch of silence, he cross-checked the ground beacon readings. Supposedly their destination was less than twenty kilos ahead. With that reminder, he re-checked the main tanks—down twenty percent—and switched the fuel transfer pumps on. Later Welk flitters didn’t have that problem. They had others, generally harder to resolve because they used more microtronics, and higher technology wasn’t always suited to conditions of high mechanical stress. Flitters incorporated high mechanical stress, and always would, at least until antigrav units were finally developed that would work planetside.

To the southwest, beyond the gray and tan of sand and rock appeared a hazy line of grayish green that grew more distinct.

Nathaniel kept his scan moving—instruments, horizon, ground ahead—as the flitter carried them toward the green, absently flicking off the transfer pumps when the main tanks registered full. He doubted that the automatic cutoffs worked, or worked well.

Beyond desert came the first flush of green, interspersed with gray sand, then the river, still flat and wide and smooth, and then more green. A long strip of permacrete road ran northwest from the cluster of hilltop buildings until it intersected a long arrow-straight section of the wide permacrete main road that presumably made its way back to Lanceville.

“Kenn base, Port Angel two inbound.”

Sylvia jerked in her seat. Had she been dozing? Nathaniel didn’t blame her. The flight had been anything but intriguing, and he personally hadn’t been that scintillating. Then, pilots with sparkling personalities in the cockpit, like bold pilots, usually didn’t live to be that old.

The Ecolitan waited, then triggered the transmitter again. “Kenn base, Port Angel two inbound.”

“That you, Jersek, still flying that antique?”

“Negative. Ecolitans Whaler and Ferro-Maine, inbound to see George Reeves-Kenn.”

“Stet. Do you have the strip and the wind indicator?”

“That’s affirmative.”

“Set her down there. See you after touchdown.”

“Not the most formal place,” Nathaniel said.

“After last night?” she asked. “That gathering was so formal everyone creaked. And you and all those proverbs…”

“I’ve got several hundred more…”

“No…”

“You see…they’re working.” He eased off power from the turbines and brought the nose back as he eased the flitter into a left-hand turn to bring it into the wind, then past the fluorescent green windsock and onto the cleared claylike strip that ran the length of the low ridge. He settled the craft into a hover and air-taxied toward the spot where a single figure waited by a small shed a hundred meters or so east of a long low stone house.

“You make that look easy,” said Sylvia.

“I’ve had some practice,” he admitted.

When he stepped from the flitter, Nathaniel’s hands were empty, since he’d reluctantly decided to leave his datacase in the Guest House—not that there was any information that wasn’t available one way or another to New Avalonian intelligence, or the Federated Hegemony, or whoever. Sylvia slipped the strap of her case over her shoulder and closed the transparent permaglass door on the copilot’s side of the flitter.

They walked toward the waiting man.

“George Reeves-Kenn.” He was rail thin with a tanned and leathery face. The green eyes were hard, and the white-gray hair was short.

“Nathaniel Whaler.”

“Sylvia Ferro-Maine.”

“Welcome to Connaught. Understand you two wanted a look-see at how our operation runs. That’s what old Walk said, anyway.” Reeves-Kenn waited. “Thought economists just looked at numbers and paper.” He frowned. “Can’t say as you look like an economist—more like a trooper. Guess you Ecolitan types are always part military.”

“We’ve been called that,” Nathaniel said. “I can send you a copy of my latest monograph, if you’d like,
The Unrecognized Diseconomies of Decentralized Metals Refining
.”

“In plain talk…what was it?”

Nathaniel shrugged. “In basic terms, it’s an exposition that quantifies how much more asteroid mining costs than people recognized. But it sounds more impressive to academics if all the title words are long.”

Reeves-Kenn smiled, briefly, and turned to Sylvia. “And you look more like a dancer…”

“I was, once, before I found happiness in economics.” She gave the beef grower a warm smile.

“Best we get started. It’ll all make more sense if you take a ride first.” Reeves-Kenn began to walk toward the corral just below the landing strip. Adjoining the corral was a barn.

The Ecolitans exchanged glances and followed.

Reeves-Kenn halted at a fence post made of formed plastic and gestured toward the black horse on the other side of the plastic composite “wire.” “This is Wild Will.”

Nathaniel looked at the horse. The horse looked at Nathaniel. The Ecolitan glanced toward Sylvia, who seemed to share his reaction.

“You not familiar with horses?” asked Reeves-Kenn.

“Not really,” admitted the Ecolitan. “I’ve ridden a few times, but I’m certainly no expert.”

Sylvia just shook her head.

“We’ve got gentle mounts.” The rancher gestured toward a figure on the shaded north side of the barn. “Jem?”

“Sir?” Jem ambled out of the shade of the shed. He was dark-haired, clean-shaven, wearing long trousers and half-calf boots, brown and scarred.

“Our guests are Ecolitans—they’re economists, not rovers. Professor Whaler and Professor Ferro-Maine.”

Jem bowed. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Jem here—he’s one of my lead rovers, and he’ll be happy to show you around.” George Reeves-Kenn smiled. “Get them mounts—Happy and Pokey—and give them the short tour, and then we’ll have a late lunch at the house.” The rancher turned to the Ecolitans. “Screen-work and bureaucracy—we still have too much here, and I need to catch up on it.” He nodded, grinned at Jem, and departed with long strides, back toward the house.

“If you’ll wait here,” said the rover, “I’ll bring out your mounts.”

“You don’t look happy about the horses,” said Sylvia.

“I worry about riding something that has its own mind and masses five to ten times what I do.” Nathaniel glanced toward the barn and the wide door, through which Jem led two saddled horses.

“Five times,” said Sylvia absently.

“That’s enough.” He grinned. “You think all the time, and she that thinks seldom finds ease.”

“No more…”

“Here you go—Happy and Pokey, gentle as you’d ever want.”

“Do you have a brother who works for the Port Authority?” asked Sylvia.

“GB? He works for Chief Walkerson.” With deft movements, Jem tied the reins to the sole hitching rail—also heavy plastic—outside the corral gate. “All he rides is a groundcar. I could never stand being cooped up in a pile of metal, or a building, not me. Now, professor, Happy likes ladies better.” He gestured toward the dark chestnut.

“And I get Pokey?” asked Nathaniel.

“He’s not that slow. He just doesn’t like to gallop.” The rover hurried back to the barn, returning riding a gray.

“What’s in the red pack?” asked Sylvia, pointing at the circular object behind her saddle. There was one behind Nathaniel’s saddle as well.

“That’s a desert kit…survival kit, in case you get stranded. We all carry them.” Jem reined up, waiting. “Artos is still wild in places.” The rover cleared his throat and looked at the two Ecolitans and their mounts.

Nathaniel got the message and untied Pokey, then climbed into the saddle, and watched as Sylvia did the same—more gracefully, he suspected.