Dante's Equation Part 37

Denton would have tried again, but it was hopeless. He put his hands on his hips, feeling very, very unhappy. He was breathing hard. His anger was building. He turned and strode through the crowd, looking for someone who could give him an answer.Just a simple freaking answer!

Then he saw one of the young males he and John worked with almost every day. He was standing still, watching Denton approach, looking right at him. Denton felt a twinge of relief and went to him, grabbed his arm. "Do you know what happened to John?"

But the male-Denton had called him Pete-just looked at him, lookedat him, right the heck into his eyes. Stared, really. After months of the guy looking at his cheek, it was kind of disconcerting. And his eyes . . . they were not nearly as dim and clueless as Denton had always imagined. In fact, they were rather callous eyes. When had that happened?

"John? What h-happened to him?" Denton heard his own voice squeak and realized that he was very badly scared.

Pete slowly smiled. "Allook saheed. He will be missed."

Denton worked his way toward the jungle, smiling and nodding at the few Sapphians who paused in their grief to give him his due as he pa.s.sed. His heart was pulsing. The throb of it joined with the lump in his neck in a blood duet. His palms were wet. He told himself he had to calm down. It seemed very important that he calm down.

He reached the jungle. No one seemed to be watching him. He attempted to slip off into the trees, but it turned into something more like thras.h.i.+ng his way into the trees. It got him away from the circle, though, and that was the point.

He blundered around in the starlit jungle for a while, his limbs jerking, sweat coming out of his body in sheets. He was like a rabbit caught in a net and, like a rabbit, he struggled with every muscle and nerve and, eventually, inevitably, exhausted himself.

Panting, he stopped and listened. He couldn't hear anything. He was alone. It was just him, by himself, going nuts in the nighttime jungle. No one had followed him. No one was coming to get him. He'd gotten a bit lost and it took him ten minutes to find a Sapphian path. It was deserted. He sank down on it, sitting on the packed earth. He had to get a grip.

After all, he didn't know what Pete had meant. He could have meant "Allook saheed[meaning Denton], yes, we will miss John." He hadn't necessarily been referring to John'sallook saheed ness. The fact that John was also calledallook saheed didn't necessarily have anything to do with his disappearance anyway. And Denton still did not know what the list meant. Even if something bad had happened to John-death, for example-maybe he had died of natural causes. Maybe there was some kind of superquick virus on this planet, one that he would, by virtue of his Earth genes, be completely immune to. Even if that list did mean people were gone forever or even dead, that didn't mean his name would ever be on it-at least, not anytime soon.

Only it did. His stomach, which was currently a quivering, sickened ma.s.s of bunny guts, said so. He had been covering up, pasting over a lot of things that bothered him. There were a lot of things that didn't seem quite right. Like the way that, in their solicitude, the Sapphians never quite left him alone. Or John, he recalled. Even swimming, they had always been surrounded. And there were other things. If he'd been in a movie theater, he would be screaming at the idiot on the screen by now:Get out of there, you stupid jerk ! But he'd been pasting it over because in real life, unlike the movies, nothing dramatic everactually happened. There never was a bogeyman under the bed, even if it would be kind of cool and dramatic if there were. And, mostly, he'd ignored stuff because he was abig freaking coward . Because he didn't have anywhere else to go. Because he needed this all to be trueso badly !

Yes, he needed it to be true. He was lost. He was so terribly, terribly far from home. And the semblance of belonging helped him to forget. He sniffed, feeling very sorry for himself.

And then he thought . . . it stillmight be okay. He really didn't know for sure that it wasn't. He could be letting his imagination get the best of him. He did that, like that time with Carter and the cat burglar thing. He knew he had a tendency to do that and- A branch cracked.

Denton got to his feet, all panicked motion. Before he could run, a shape stepped from the trees. It was the girl with the white-gold hair, Eyanna. She watched him warily. She had probably heard him blundering through the trees earlier.Earth had probably heard him.

"Ta zhecta,"he said.

"Ta zhecta."She hesitated, wary, then held something toward him. It was the photograph he had given to her. "Yours?" Her face was intent, questioning.

"No. . . . I gave it to you. You keep it."

She frowned at him in frustration. "Yours?" she asked again, more loudly now, holding the photograph up as if he wasn't looking at it properly. "Is sheyour female?"

He hadn't a clue what she was going on about and couldn't care less. The photograph, its subject, the entire history and science of photography, for that matter, was the last thing on his freaking mind right now.

"Yes, she is my female," he answered, more to shut Eyanna up than anything else. And then he remembered what John had said. What had he called Eyanna? A ghost woman? That was right! Her name had been said in the circle-and she was here, looking healthy and, if not happy, certainly alive.

"Eyanna, listen! My friend's name was said in the circle tonight. What does that mean? What happens to these ones?"

Eyanna took a step back ungracefully. A small fearful sound escaped her mouth.

That was not quite the reaction Denton had hoped for. He tried to keep his voice calm. "Eyanna? Please? It is important. Tell me what happens to these ones. No one will tell me."

She looked up at the sky, clicking her teeth anxiously. Her legs quivered as though she desperately wanted to flee. One arm reached back behind her, groping. She found a tree and her fingers dug into it. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Denton suddenly had the conviction, unwelcome as it was, that she wasreliving something-the way her head was tilted up, the cant of her body. The thought made him turn cold, because whatever it was, it was not a nice happy memory. Oh no. She knew where John had gone all right. She hadbeen where John had gone. And it was not a good place at all.

She whispered something. He didn't understand the word.

"What? Eyanna, what did you say?"

"Skalkit!" she said loudly. She opened her eyes. They were wild. "Skalkit! Skalkit!" She looked at him, intense, as if she'd just revealed some big secret.

He wanted to stomp in his frustration. "I don't know this word.d.a.m.n it! What isskalkit ?"

She gave the gesture for "no," backing away into the trees.

"Eyanna, what is skalkit!"

She stopped, just visible behind the foliage, her eyes huge, but she didn't speak.

Denton took a deep breath. Made himself count to ten. If he wasn't careful he'd scare her away and then he'd never know. He spoke with quiet hysteria. "The ones whose names are said, are they . . ." He pantomimed death again because he had no alternative. This time he grabbed his chest and fell to the ground, doing it in a half-a.s.sed way so as not to alarm her. He looked up to see if she had gotten it.

She'd gotten it. He could see on her face that she had. She gave the gesture for "yes." He got up, his heart knocking. Okay. So they were dead. That was bad but he'd already guessed that much.

"But how? What isskalkit , Eyanna? How?"

Her face was slack in the starlight, her nostril ridges flared with her rapid breathing. She was traumatized, he could see that, but he didn't care. He didn't give a flying fig what she was feeling, as long as she told him. Shehad to tell him.

She slowly raised her hands. He had no idea what she was doing until her hands reached her shoulders and slowly formed themselves into the semblance of claws. Her lips pulled back, baring her teeth. And she roared.

Three hours later, Denton was on the run. He had managed to pull himself together enough to go back to the village and act like Mr. Happy-go-allooksaheed. He had gone to bed early. And then, when all sounds had died away, when he was pretty sure the entire Sapphian race was drunk and dead to the world, he snuck out of his hut and headed for the trees.

He took very little with him-a couple of blankets, which he had done up in a bundle, along with some cooked grain. He could live off the land easily. What he really needed was just to get about a million miles away.

He entered the jungle on a path that he thought led toward the bottom of the horseshoe gorge, the mouth of it, the way out. He hadn't been there since the day he'd arrived and he'd lain in his hut for a good while trying to map it out in his head. He never had been good at directions, but he thought he could pull this off. Hehad to.

He didn't know what the h.e.l.l kind of animal Eyanna had tried to describe to him, but he knew that he never wanted to see one, hear one, smell one, or even see one on TV. Because now that he had faced the truth, now that he had made the firm decision to go and had given up on the fairy tale-and even on the s.e.x part-this wholeallook saheed thing seemed more and more like the biggest hunk of mouse bait he had ever seen in his life. What, were they fattening him up like Hansel and Gretel? Was he about to become an Aztecan Blue Plate Special or what?

Not if he had anything to say about it.

He walked down a dark path he thought was the way out of the gorge. He walked for a long time. Too long. He was about to admit that he was going the wrong way when the trees cleared and he got a view of salmon wall. It had to be the opening of the gorge. He increased his pace.

It wasn't that he wasnot afraid. He was. But once he had put some distance between himself and the main circle of huts, he felt better. He would feel better still once he was out of the gorge, but he was not really worried about making it. Maybe it was that old denial, that conviction that nothing serious wouldreally happen to him, that the bogeyman would not end up being under the bed when he looked, that he would be scared, maybe even badly, but that in the end he would be fine because he always had been before.

So when the path before him darkened and the shadows resolved themselves into Sapphians, to three or four males, he was legitimately surprised.

He stopped, not even having much of a reaction. Then, in a rush of as much annoyance as fear, he started ahead again, jogging, then running, prepared to plow his way through them and just get the h.e.l.l out of there. After all, he was bigger than they were by far. Hadn't he once thought he could easily take them if it ever came to that?

He picked up speed, seeing, even as he was running, that there were more than three or four of them there, that there were a lot, maybe a dozen, and probably more behind him, too. But he was still going to run right through them. He was! He would scatter them like bowling pins and . . .

He hit them. They had formed a line across the path. He did take down a couple, the ones right in front. But he went down, too, and before he could get up again, there were hands on him, many hands, and they were stronger than they looked.

He still struggled, an outraged American. He didn't cry out, but there were athletic grunts coming out of his mouth. His feet pedaled over something soft trying to gain traction. They grabbed his legs. Someone was binding his arms, hard, behind his back, and there were no more bobbing heads, no moreallook saheed , no words at all.

And it wasn't until he was sure, really 100 percent sure, that he was not going to escape, that they had captured him and were not being nice to him at all, that he understood that the bogeymanhad been under the bed this time.

And he began to scream.

16.3. Seventy-Thirty Jill Talcott

The landing field at the s.p.a.ceport was enormous-as long as three or four of the City's blocks. In the center sat the dome, looking like the round head of a giant emerging from the earth. And at the edge of the landing field, next to the red gla.s.s wall that marked the southern border of the City, was the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.

It had taken them longer to get here than Jill had antic.i.p.ated. In fact, they'd gotten so hot and tired the night before that they'd camped out in one of the buildings with power on the eastwest artery. There were any number of empty rooms to be had, but Nate had wanted them to "stick together" in case "the aliens showed up."

So Nate had slept on the floor next to Jill's narrow bed. She could fit in the alien beds, if she turned on her side. Barely. She'd awakened at one point and lay listening to him breathing for a long time, thinking,This is what it's like not to be alone in the night .

It wasn't bad. But she didn't want to come to depend on it.

Nate made a beeline for the s.p.a.cecraft. It was shaped in the same functional aerodynamic manner as the air cars, but it was huge, larger than a zeppelin, and a deep rusty brown from stem to stern. As they drew closer, Jill realized this was not paint but dust from the red desert sand.

She wasn't all that interested in the thing. The sun was hot, and she couldn't shake a sense of la.s.situde no matter how often they rested. She yawned, watching Nate walk excitedly up and down its length, then crouch underneath it so he could touch the landing gear. The belly of the s.h.i.+p formed a cavelike roof over his head. He rubbed at the dust-it had been baked into a hard glaze.

"They haven't moved this thing in ages," he said, disappointed.

Jill bit back a plea for him to come out from there. She didn't like seeing him poised under the giant machine like a bug under a giant's foot.

"Wow!" Nate reached up as high as he could to touch the side of the craft.

"Let's go inside," Jill said. A fingernail found its way into her mouth to be chewed. She looked around, feeling exposed on this vast open field, to the rays of the sun, if nothing else.

"Inside the s.h.i.+p?" Nate sounded excited.

"Inside thebuilding , Nate, the s.p.a.ceport."

"But, Jill . . ." He backed up to get a better look, tennis shoes shuffling on the landing field. "This is, like,a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p ."

"Yeah, maybe later, Dr. Who. Come on."

Up close, the round dome was like the sh.e.l.l of some thick-plated insect. There was an alcove into which the main doors were set, and the depth of this alcove-a good ten feet-was the actual width of the s.p.a.ceport walls. The doors were metal and heavy and had long vertical handles. There were no windows at all.

Nate looked at Jill, eyebrow c.o.c.ked, and tugged on a handle. The door gave easily-it had been made for a light touch. With a throaty suction noise it opened. Inside was a heavy rubber seal two feet thick.

Nate whistled. "Interesting. I don't suppose that's for air-conditioning, do you?"

Jill shook her head. She felt a tingling excitement in her belly, but she wasn't ready to discuss the idea she'd had on the rooftop with Nate. Not yet.

The power appeared to be out in the building, but as they stepped inside the lights came on. There was the sound of machinery kicking in.

"Could be worse," Jill said. "Power could be off completely."

Nate said nothing, but he looked worried.

The s.p.a.ceport was nothing like an airport back home. There were no gates, no chairs for waiting relations, no boards announcing departures and arrivals-and certainly there were no travelers. The halls were not all that large, either, as though the building never had been intended to accommodate crowds.

"Next flight to Milwaukee, ten minutes," Nate mocked with a staticky voice spoken through his hand. He looked at Jill with a fake astonished expression:Did you hear that? Let's go! She rolled her eyes.

They followed the hallway to the center of the building. There the corridor opened up into a gigantic empty hangar. There was a fifty-foot-wide ledge all around the cavernous dock, and this ledge ended abruptly in a plummeting drop. The s.p.a.ce was large enough to accommodate several dozen s.h.i.+ps the size of the one on the landing field, but there were no s.h.i.+ps at all.

"Where are they?" Nate sounded seriously b.u.mmed.

Jill didn't answer. Things were looking worse all the time. The s.p.a.ceport appeared to be completely defunct. "s.h.i.+t, Jill, this place is a tomb." "Thereought to be aliens here. The City isn't completely uninhabited." "I guess when your world is dying it's not a big priority to explore s.p.a.ce," he answered bitterly. "We don't know that their world is dying. Besides, they still have to get aroundthis planet." "Who says? What if this city is all there is?" Jill tapped a shoulder blade with her fingers, frowning in thought. "There's still that s.h.i.+p outside," Nate said, with as much doubt as hope. "Itmight be operational." "The control room's over there. Come on. Let's see what they've got."

The control room powered up when they walked in the door, the screens going from black to green readouts in seconds. Nate's mood perked up a bit at the sight of all those computers. He pulled two of the narrow chairs over to a table and sat in both of them. There was no keyboard. He pa.s.sed his fingers over the screen experimentally. The alien text s.h.i.+fted under his touch.

"I'm working an alien computer," he said to her in a voice that a boy might use while displaying a prizewinning toad to his mother.

"Yes, I see that, Nate," Jill answered, smiling. Jill watched him work for a few minutes, then pulled up two chairs of her own. It was time to come clean about what she'd been thinking, but it felt so momentous to say it out loud that a sudden awkwardness gripped her.

"Nate . . . you know those seals we saw just now, on the s.p.a.ceport door?" He glanced at her. "Yeah." "What did they remind you of?" He stopped messing with the screen and turned to look at her, waiting. "Like the rubber curtain we had in our lab, Nate! It's insulation.Wave technology. " He didn't look surprised. "Yeah?" "Well . . . we have to find out! We have to find out if they're using wave technology. Because if they are . . ." She drummed her fingers on the table. It was so important that she explain it well. She made

herself take a breath and slow down. "Nate, what if Copernicus had had the opportunity to be rocketed three hundred years into the future, to see the full implications of his ideas?"

Nate lifted an eyebrow, but his face was still guarded. "That would be very cool. a.s.suming he could understand it."

"Well, that's exactly whatwe've been given! We have a chance to see what the one-minus-one can really do-if it's really as important as we think and how and in what ways it can be used. Think of the possibilities! Kobinski's ma.n.u.script-I mean, the ma.n.u.script isnothing . We're being offered a look at the future-ourfuture! We can move our research forward by several hundred years-maybe even more!"

She forced herself to stop, though she could have gone on. Her father had been such a huckster that she, by inclination, hated the very idea of a sales pitch. She waited for Nate to latch on to the concept on his own, had no doubt that he would. After all, hadn't he been by her side for the past two years? Wasn't the one-minus-one as much his baby as hers? But his dark eyes looked troubled. She couldn't read him.

"What we want to know," she said, nodding toward the computers, "is if their s.p.a.ce technology uses the one-minus-one wave. Any suggestions on how we do that?"

Nate turned slowly back to the monitor. "Maybe we can find some math."

"Nope. I thought about that. We're used to math being a cross-language tool because most cultures on Earth use the Greek math symbols. But of course, that wouldn't apply here."

"No. You're right. Who knows how they represent the number four?"

"Exactly. Butdiagrams might be helpful. Think you can get into the guts of this thing?"

He was staring blankly at the screen.

"Nate?"

He blinked, sat up straighter. "I can try." His fingers moved over the screen. "I'm pretty blind without knowing the language; all I can do is poke around. But something might come up." Even as distracted as he seemed to be, he couldn't let a line like that go by without comment. He looked at her and waggled his eyebrows. "Heh heh heh."

She let out a snort that was part laughter, part embarra.s.sment. Nate proceeded to poke around for a good long time. Mostly the screens made absolutely no sense to them. After about twenty minutes a diagram appeared.