CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

They called the band of survivors simply the “Tribe,” for want of anything better. Nobody had lined them up for an exact count, but there seemed to be between forty and fifty souls, including numerous children. From the progress that Naarmegen was making in establishing a kind of pidgin that mixed their speech with parts of a South African dialect that he’d had some familiarity with and a smattering of English as seemed to suit the occasion, they called their settlement Joburg—obviously after the city that had once existed in the now-snowy region to the south.

The leader, Rakki, had led a small band who arrived from elsewhere and asserted their supremacy over an initial group who seemed to have numbered around a dozen. The rest had appeared in ones, twos, and odd groups since. Far from being among the elders of the assortment of still largely dazed and disoriented individuals who made up the Tribe, Rakki maintained his primacy through ruthlessness and sheer battling prowess despite his physical handicap—evidently the ruling currency of the times. Guesses put him in his mid or even lower teens. He himself was unable to give any account of his years, since for a time that the hapless inhabitants wandered among erupting landscapes and falling storms of fire, the notion of “year” had lost all meaning. Most astounding of all was his virtually total loss of all memories prior to the catastrophe, which seemed to be the case with all the younger people. Only a few of the oldest survivors seemed to possess any coherent recollections at all of the world that had once been.

“The best I can make of it is that it’s some kind of mental defense mechanism,” Beth said to Keene and Sariena as they stood by the landing-area-side windows in the OpComs Dome at Serengeti, watching the shuttle from the Varuna that had landed a short time previously being lowered to a horizontal position. The intermittently high winds and persistent ground tremors posed too much of a hazard to leave them standing vertically. The permanent pads to be built on the far side of what was currently the landing area would have silos.

The base was continuing to take shape, and Gallian and Charlie Hu had found time to come down to the surface at last. Keene and Sariena had come over from the now-finished mess facility to greet them. Beth was doing a valiant job as the mission’s de facto psychologist and effective psychiatrist. “A collective amnesia is blocking out experiences that were too horrific to be retained consciously. They could have caused mental paralysis to the point of dysfunctionality. Survival needs had to come first.”

“There were a lot of theories like that relating to the state of mind of humanity after the Venus catastrophes,” Sariena said. “Repressed racial memories that found their expression in myths and religion.”

Keene nodded. He’d heard suggestions himself that such buried traumas lay at the root of their reenactment in the senseless aerial bombardment holocausts of modern warfare, and twentieth-century terrors of nuclear annihilation, but had never known how far to believe it. It just seemed to him that the bulk of the human race never passed over any new way of wiping each other out at any opportunity. Or was that in itself another manifestation of what Sariena was talking about? If so, did the Kronians really stand a chance of ultimately producing anything different?

“This looks like them now,” he said, staring out. A Scout carrier was emerging from the huddle of freight movers and forklifts around the shuttle. It turned and headed toward the Operations and Communications Dome.

Surprisingly, in view of the role that physical violence played in determining who would dominate, it was those of smaller stature among the survivors who seemed to have fared better. Presumably their lower minimum nutritional needs had given them the edge through the times when food had been all but nonexistent. From Maria Sanchez’s observations, the newborns and infants were small by the standards that had applied previously, too. And similar things seemed to be happening among the strains of animals that were making a reappearance. Naarmegen’s surveys had identified pygmy breeds of okapi, hog, eland, hyena, and another doglike species that he hadn’t been able to identify, a number of them already showing adaptations to the cooling climate. Again, the animals that Rakki and a few other privileged individuals of the Tribe rode were “mule-like,” but with signs of other odd traits being expressed that didn’t belong.

In the short time that had gone by, this couldn’t have come about through any process of gradual selection from random mutations. Rather, it pointed to the variability already having been there in the genomes, which was the conclusion the Kronians had been coming to for some time. This was what Vicki and Luthis, the biologist also from Dione, and Aztec‘s senior scientist, were coming out to investigate further. Keene could picture her impatience on reading the latest reports from Earth. The Aztec was under way from Titan now but not due to arrive for another sixty days.

“Do you think that everything you ever experience is locked away inside somewhere, the way some people say?” Sariena asked Beth. “Nothing is ever lost?”

“More or less,” Beth replied. “But I don’t think memory is localized in any place. That’s why they were always having trouble finding it.”

“So what do you think?” Keene asked.

“The information could be held in interference patterns of some kind of wave process in the brain,” Beth said. “Kind of like a hologram.”

“Huge capacities,” Keene commented. He was intrigued.

“Yes, that’s my point.” Beth caught the faint smile on Sariena’s face that seemed to carry a mixed message of maybe . . . and then again, maybe not. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” Sariena answered. “Maybe the information isn’t ‘in’ there in any way at all. What if the brain is just an organ that accesses it from somewhere else?” She gestured at a screen on one of the nearby consoles. It showed a view of Joburg, coming in from a camera mounted on one of the vehicles that was there currently, and had been left transmitting. Kurt Zeigler had gone out with a group to see the place and make himself known. “It would be like looking inside there for a permanent representation of those huts and people. But you won’t find any. The information that creates the picture is coming from elsewhere.”

“Are we back to where the Kronian designer lives?” Keene asked, smiling. He meant it to be flippant, but Sariena’s face remained serious.

“Maybe,” she conceded evenly. “You know, Lan, science as the Terrans conceived it ended up really as just bigger telescopes, faster computers… better and cheaper extensions of technology. And that’s wonderfully effective for understanding and manipulating the material, physical world. But only Terran scientists could have ended up believing that that’s all there is to reality. All children know it isn’t so.”

Keene grinned. “And Kronians?”

“You already know the answer to that. We think things are there for a purpose.”

Just then, Gallian, with Charlie Hu and several others just off the shuttle, entered from the level below, bubbling hellos and greeting to all. As was typical of Gallian’s style, he was wearing a maroon flight-deck jacket and could have passed for one of the shuttle’s crew instead of overall director of the mission. “Landen! Sariena!” he threw across, acknowledging their presence. And then, after an exchange with the Watch Officer and duty staff to check on the situation at Joburg and things in general, he came over to join them.

The puckish face was beaming as usual beneath the mantle of silver, wavy hair, but he was already puffing from the gravity and the stairs. “Well, so here we are back again. I’m not going to risk any comments, Landen—for fear of being in bad taste. But things have changed somewhat, yes?”

“I don’t think there’s much you could say that hasn’t been eclipsed by the reality, Gallian,” Keene said. “But for what it’s worth, welcome back to Earth.”

“Now you have to grow your Earth legs again,” Sariena told Gallian. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem so bad the second time.”

“Well, that’s good to know.” Gallian looked at Beth and inquired breezily. “And how are we making out in your new specialty field of shell-shock patients? Any signs of getting through to them yet?”

“It’s a slow business,” Beth replied. “There’s a lot of suspicion and suppressed hostility to deal with. But I think we’re learning.”

“On-the-job training. It’s the best kind. You didn’t think we brought you here for a vacation, did you? By the time you get back, you’ll be a seasoned psychologist with exclusive experience of dealing with Terran survivors. You’ll be known across all of Kronia.”

Beth smiled at the thought but sighed in a way that said it would be a long time yet.

“And we have news from Kronia,” Gallian announced to all of them. “The latest there is that Urzin and the Congress have finally pulled rank and refused to buy the Pragmatists’ stunt to worm their way into the Directorates. I’ve rarely heard our President speak so forcefully about anything. And both Deputies supported him. They were firm that Kronia has its own procedures that are appropriate to Kronia’s ways, and a few malcontents from Earth have no business coming here trying to change them. It’s not their world too, that owes them any equal voice in its affairs as they claim; it’s ours. If they want to come back to Earth and start their own system here again, that’s up to them.” Gallian peered briefly at the window, grinned, and shrugged. “Well, good luck, I suppose, if that’s what they want to do.” He cast around at the company again. “But it seems that with luck all this Terran-style political nonsense might be over at last, finally, and now we’ll all be able to concentrate on things that are useful.” He punched Keene playfully on a shoulder. “No offense, eh, Lan? I wouldn’t want to belittle your history or revered institutions or anything.”

“Gallian, you don’t have to worry yourself about that,” Keene said. Actually, he was feeling pretty good. It meant that things had gone the way he’d expected. Cavan’s attempt to maneuver him into involvement with the politics instead of focusing on the kind of work that he had always felt to be his true calling had been proved overcautious after all, and Keene was vindicated. The old ways of antagonisms and violence, whether physical, political, or economic, were dead. And the new way that Jon Foy had painted so vividly in Keene’s imagination long ago had become the new reality after all.

At Joburg, Kurt Zeigler tried to follow while Naarmegen tried with exchanges of words and gestures to piece together from Rakki and the white-headed old man called Yobu, who was miraculously still alive, the story of Rakki and his original group of companions. He had heard the account from Keene and the others of how the Tribe had formed mainly from people drifting in. But he was particularly interested in the group that had come to rule, displacing the original occupants of the place.

They were sitting under a thatched awning by the pool cleared in the creek, since Zeigler didn’t like the smells, bugs, and closed-in feeling inside the huts. Some of the women who had been washing skins and recognizable remnants of clothing still watched the strangers with a fear that hadn’t gone completely away, some with children clinging to them, equally wide-eyed and awed. Zeigler tried to ignore them. He would have preferred not to have to rely on academics or scientists to translate, because he suspected their ideological tendencies and considered them naive. But he was stuck with Naarmegen for the time being. He wouldn’t want him to be involved later, when more serious business might need to be addressed.

“Rakki and Yobu, and it sounds like five others, including Calina”—that was the name of Rakki’s fair-skinned woman—”came from another clan, or whatever, who live in some caves to the east,” Naarmegen said. “From the sound of it, there were a lot more of them than here.”

“So there are other groups too,” Zeigler said. That was interesting.

“Seems like it.”

“How far to the east?”

“I can’t make it out, but it sounds like a long way. They wandered around for a long time before they found this place.”

“Not very hospitable,” Zeigler remarked. East was the inland direction, where the river that flowed west and then south around the plateau came from—a desolation of earthquake-shattered mountains, volcanos, lava flows, and swamps.

“They’re a tough bunch,” Naarmegen said.

Zeigler looked Rakki up and down again. His body seemed youthful in some ways, yet it was scarred and muscled like a veteran gladiator’s. His face was barely able to support a beard, but at the same time lined and hardened. The eyes were cruel, alert, cunning—but not unintelligent. He looked back at Zeigler with an unbending stare that seemed to say, So what of your machines and your knowledge of many things? When it comes to the things that make the measure of a man, I, Rakki, can hold my own with the best of you. 

”Why did they leave the caves? Wasn’t there more safety and protection with the numbers there?” Zeigler asked.

Naarmegen passed the question on. Anger flashed in Rakki’s eyes when he answered. His hand move unconsciously to rub his leg. Zeigler caught the words “one only could rule,” “betrayed by lies,” “left as dead, for the…” something that sounded like some kind of scavenger, or maybe ants or worms, and, “he with holes in teeth,” pointing to his mouth.

“There was a rivalry to be chief—one of these to-the-death things,” Naarmegen supplied. “He was tricked into going out somewhere with some of the other guy’s cronies. On the way they jumped him, skewered the buddy he was with, and tossed Rakki over a cliff. But Yobu sent the one called Enka out looking. He found Rakki just about ready to snuff it, and the others went there and got him. I guess, obviously, they couldn’t go back.”

“Is that where he messed up his leg?” Zeigler asked.

“Rakki, when you fall from cliff.” Naarmegen pointed. “Your leg is broken then?”

Rakki nodded curtly and glowered. “And pierced by spear. Many days, they carry …” Zeigler missed the rest. White-haired Yobu added some more.

“The rival’s name is Jemmo. He’s still there, at the caves. But one day Rakki will rule them. And some swamps—I’m not sure where they fit in. Revenge seems to be an obsession.”

Zeigler had noticed how Rakki’s eyes would stray toward Kelm when Kelm came close as he ambled about, checking over the surroundings and developing his Earth legs. Rakki watched the other SA troopers who were present too. What seemed to interest him was their guns. He seemed to know what they were. However proud and defiant the eyes that met Zeigler’s consciously, the glances when Rakki didn’t realize Zeigler was watching betrayed envy of the strangers’ power. And that could be the pointer to finding the kind of opening for a mutual advancing of interests that Zeigler was looking for.

A message an hour or so ago from Serengeti had brought the news that the Pragmatists’ bid to expand their powers back on Kronia had failed. Before very much longer, therefore, Zeigler expected to receive the code notifying him that Blue Moon was going ahead, which meant he should take any opportunity that presented itself to prepare accordingly. Recruiting the small Tribe here at Joburg would not bring about anything decisive; but they were natural fighters, and it could help. However, if they could lead him to this other group, who by the sound of things numbered considerably more, that could make a significant difference.

And there might well be more still to be found, scattered around in this ruin of a continent, beyond those.