CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

It had been a while since the days when anyone with the inclination could come into the upper level of the OpComs dome to watch the shuttles from orbit come down, and to await incoming arrivals. OpComs was still there, but more restricted these days to air and orbital traffic control, which was what it had been built for in the first place. Buses from the new landing silos and service bays on the far side of what had been the pad area now delivered to the Terminal Building, erected a short distance along from the OpComs dome in front of the dorm blocks. The dorm blocks had acquired some individual rooms as well as billeting and were still used for shorter-term and temporary accommodation. However, most of the original inhabitants had moved to a residential complex outside the central work area of the base, which had separate living units as well as communal dining and recreation and offered more comfort and privacy. On the opposite side of the central area, the workshop and production facilities had grown and diversified.

Keene stood with Vicki, Sariena, Wernstecki, and Charlie Hu, some way ahead of an expectant crowd gathered at the edge of the area in front of the Terminal Building, which with orbital traffic now farther away had become the apron for surface aircraft and local flyers. Adreya Laelye waited a few paces in front of them, facing a podium with a microphone and draped with Kronia’s colors. On either side of the group, the honor guard stood in two detachments facing each other. A small procession of vehicles approached from the pads, bringing the first contingent to be shuttled down from the Kronian large-capacity interplanetary cruiser Gallian, now ten hours in Earth orbit after completing its maiden voyage from Saturn.

The onlookers included Shayle, who had supervised the shutdown of Agni and its return to orbit to recombine with the Varuna after the permanent power plant delivered by the Aztec was assembled and brought online. Also present were Jansinick Wernstecki and Merlin Friet, currently experimenting with using AG methods to transport cut blocks now that the basic lithoforming quarries were operating; Pieter Naarmegen and Elmer Luthis from the Aztec, joint-managing Serengeti’s biological research activity; Kerry Heeland, on a break from the Varuna, still involved with probe reconnaissance and surveys, along with Owen Erskine, patched up and fit again; and Beth, irrevocably stamped as a psychologist now, and Maria Sanchez, highly regarded as the medic who had dug the bullets out of Owen and stitched him up, and who had probably saved Charlie Hu’s leg. Adreya had somehow contrived to look formally professional in a dark business dress and shoulder wrap to perform her last function in the capacity in which she had been acting since Zeigler’s demise. This was a special occasion.

The vehicles drew to a halt ahead of them, and the arrivals began emerging. The officers of the two guard detachments called their units to attention, then to present arms. The rank on one side was commanded by Mertak and wore the dove-gray uniforms of the recently instituted Kronian Armed Service. With its record of uncertain loyalties and inadequate internal policing, the former Security Arm had suffered too much loss of confidence and prestige, and had been disbanded. Robin had been entrusted with command—by Adreya Laelye—of the Terran part of the operation, and done a commendable job with the restructuring and reorganizing; but he had departed two weeks previously with the repaired and refitted Trojan, resuming its original mission to Jupiter. A major from the Trojan‘s SA complement who had refused to join the rebel faction and been incarcerated, had assumed temporary command pending the Gallian‘s arrival.

The other guard detachment was composed of younger, dark-skinned members, equally crisp in their drill and smartly attired in navy-blue tunics devised for a new corps called the Auxiliary Guard. In command of them was Enka, with Rakki and Jemmo standing by to lend a native presence. The rulers of Kronia had accepted that their trust in the inherent universal goodness of human nature had been misplaced and not a little naive. As all of history had shown, elements would arise in any society which, when no other option is left, would seek to impose themselves by force, and could only be met with force. Kronia had made the mistake of thinking that since nothing existed on Earth to oppose its far-flung mission to return, there was nothing to protect against. Kronia had been very lucky.

Keene spotted Cavan’s lean form and Alicia with her blond hair among the first to appear. Cavan picked him and Vicki out at once, and even at that distance Keene could see the smile come into the pink face beneath the thinning hair, and the nod of recognition. An assortment of people in typical Kronian tunics, a few jackets and skirts, and more Armed Service uniforms came next—one of them Mylor Vorse from SOE. And then the arriving group opened up to admit to the front a robust, swarthy, silver-haired figure with vaguely Asian features, wearing a maroon robe-like garment. His eyes were as alive and alert as ever, scanning the crowd and taking in details of the base and the general surroundings even as he led the others forward. Kronians didn’t need to sag under sudden, unaccustomed weight anymore—they got acclimatized using Yarbat generators well in advance. Adreya Laelye smiled as she moved forward to meet him at the podium. “Welcome to Earth,” she greeted.

“Already, I feel I’ve come home,” Jon Foy, the first official Kronian governor, who would be taking over from her, replied.

There was a reception that evening in the former general mess room and cafeteria, now enhanced into being something of a social center. It was both a welcoming party for Foy and his administration, and a delayed celebration of Earth’s consolidation as an extension of Kronia. For some reason, an overt display of victory and jubilation before Saturn’s ascendancy was formally ratified would not have felt right. Now it seemed that everyone was making an extra effort to make good the lost time.

Of course, there were impromptu speeches and toasts. Naarmegen proposed one to “Landen Keene, Robin Delucey, and Jansinick Wernstecki, the three people who saved Earth and the Aztec, and brought about the Pragmatist downfall.” Keene objected that they couldn’t have done it without Charlie Hu and Kerry Heeland, and Sariena and Shayle…  and then added Reese, Yarbat, and others not present, finally throwing out his arms and exclaiming, “Hell, it was all of us!” which earned him cheers. Later in the evening, Adreya steered Vicki aside to learn more about the latest ideas on Earth’s origins, and he finally got a chance to talk with Vorse and Foy.

Apparently, the motion of Athena was still uncertain.

“It’s not over,” Vorse told him. “We’ve been getting better information now that we can coordinate observations from Saturn and Earth. The period we’ve just been through could turn out to be the end of a lull. Athena is causing another wave of disruption among the Asteroids. Kronia could be facing more danger yet.”

“How bad?” Keene asked.

“Nobody can say.”

Foy elaborated. “But it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the culture we’ve brought into being out at Saturn could be rendered nonviable—at least, for some time. And even pulling everyone back to Earth wouldn’t necessarily eliminate all the risks. Things could get bad again here too. Suppose Venus were sent into a repeating resonant pattern in the way that Emil Farzhin says happened five thousand years ago with Mars.”

It didn’t come as a total surprise. That had been one of the reasons for sending the Varuna back to reconnoiter the situation on Earth, after all, and for the rush in sending the equipment that the Aztec had brought. The problems entailed in being forced to begin again on Earth should be straightforward enough to deal with compared to those of surviving in airless, lifeless space environments, and all the other things the Kronians had already learned to regard as normal. But as a first essential they would need safe refuges to retire to during periods of meteorite storms, floods, or other generally bad times. Not flimsy frameworks thrown up to maximize short-term rental returns on investment, like those that had constituted most of the cities now swept away or buried, but massive, non-corroding structures in high places, virtually embedded in and forming extensions of the earth itself.

“We’ve been giving it top priority,” Keene said. “Jan and his people are having a great time. They’ve got half a mountain out there cut into play blocks. It looks like the Nursery of the Gods.”

“We saw it on the way down from orbit,” Vorse said. “Very impressive. We’ll be going out tomorrow to see it.”

“It was just as well that we scheduled a further consignment,” Foy said.

“Very fortunate,” Keene agreed. He eyed Vorse. “Your idea, Mylor?”

Vorse shook his head. “No, it was Jon. Always the optimist.”

“Optimism pays off,” Foy told them.

The Gallian had brought a further consignment of the latest litho-tech equipment from Titan. After its departure from Saturn, more survivors had been found in parts of Asia and both North and South America. Accordingly, more shelter construction was being planned for bases to be sited at highland locations in Tibet, Bolivia, and the Rockies. A contact party put down by a lander from the Varuna had reported that the latter group, incredibly, included individuals that Keene himself had known and had last seen leaving in the last plane out from Vandenberg, heading for the Air Force survival fortress beneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Pressures of other things had so far prevented him going there personally.

“Sariena and Charlie are working out a symbolic system to write our story in stone for posterity,” Keene said. “Not dependent on any specific language. But decodable by anyone with the right knowledge.”

Foy smiled. “Why? Don’t they think we’ll still be here five thousand years from now?”

Keene shrugged. “Just in case. We’d like to leave something more permanent this time.”

Then Luthis and Shayle joined them, and for a while the talk ranged from native farming projects around Serengeti to Kronian spiritual philosophy. Keene was glad that, while he wouldn’t have wanted Gallian’s memory forgotten, nobody stood up to start giving an obituary or calling for a memorial moment of silence. The party was going well, and such things were appropriate to other occasions.

And he knew Gallian would have wanted it that way.

After they had helped close the last of the festivities down, Keene and Vicki walked with Cavan and Alicia back toward the newcomers’ room in what had been the dorm blocks, which was on the way to the residential area. With all the day’s business, it was Keene’s first chance to talk with Cavan about anything other than incidental matters. Keene fell quiet as they approached the point where the walkway leading to the building left the path that he and Vicki would continue along. Alicia was talking about her reactions to the first day of being back on Earth.

“Yes, everything was almost totally destroyed, and it will be a long time recovering. But there’s a… feeling that I can’t describe. It hit me when I saw the water and the areas starting to turn green again from the shuttle on the way down.”

“I know. I felt it too,” Vicki said. “It’s like suddenly being in touch with Life again. You said it happened to you after you left the base area with Charlie, didn’t you, Lan?”

No response.

Alicia nodded. “Yes, that’s it exactly! Being part of a living world. All of a sudden you realize how sterile Kronia was. I mean, of course we couldn’t have done without it. It preserved knowledge and technology when everything else was lost. And I’m sure that when we expand out of the Solar System, that’s where it will be from. But for all the other things, human things, we have to rebuild the center of the new civilization here. Kronia will be an outpost. Don’t you think so?”

She directed her last words at Keene and Cavan. They had come to the intersection with the path and halted. But Keene was looking at Cavan, as if not hearing her. Cavan was taking in the night scene of the base with its geometric shapes and lights, as if leaving Keene to come to his own conclusions in his own time—but somehow giving the impression of having an intimation of what they might be.

“That was why you did it, wasn’t it, Leo,” Keene said finally. Cavan turned on a look of feigned innocence that would have been an offense to Keene’s intelligence if they hadn’t known each other for years. “Why you wanted me on the Earth mission. It was political. You guessed something like that would happen. You tried recruiting me that time when you and Alicia came to Dione, but I said I wasn’t interested in politics. So you set me up with Vorse and Foy. You wanted me to know more about what Kronia meant and where it was heading.”

“You’d have stayed on Titan, content to let your work on the AG program justify your existence,” Cavan agreed, dropping the pretense.

“That whole line of Vorse’s about my being needed to supervise Agni‘s MHD system was part of it. It wasn’t necessary. Shayle could have done it.”

Vicki was looking from one to the other, puzzled. “Leo had some ulterior agenda for sending you to Earth? Why?”

“I think I can see it now… .” Alicia said. “Leo never discussed it with me.”

“Not the kind of thing one talks about when the person concerned isn’t there,” Cavan remarked.

“See what?” Vicki asked again. She had never pretended to harbor any political instinct.

“Look at what Lan did in those last days back on Earth,” Cavan said to her. “If you’d had a good idea that Valcroix’s people were going to pull off something like they did, wouldn’t that be exactly the kind of person you’d want to have here? I’m sorry if it was using you, Lan, and that it put you in personal danger. But as you can see now, a lot more was at stake.” He shrugged in a way that said life had to be that way sometimes. “Anyway, as you yourself said a moment ago, I did give you the opportunity to volunteer.”

Keene just shook his head, for the moment too taken aback by the enormity of the whole picture that was opening up to respond.

“Are you saying you knew what the Pragmatists were planning?” Alicia asked Cavan.

He shook his head. “Not specifically. If I had known, and could prove it, I’d have taken the evidence straight to Urzin. But I’d been around those kinds of people long enough to be pretty sure they’d try something. They don’t concede power easily. The Kronians can work miracles in some areas, but they’ve got their weak spots too. We saw some of them when they came to Earth. No security-minded government would ever have let the SA become compromised in the way it was. I tried getting it across to people like Urzin and Foy, but they just didn’t have the experience.”

Now Keene was more confused than offended. “But that’s not the way it was, Leo,” he objected. “The reason I said I didn’t want to get mixed up in political things back then was because I didn’t think Valcroix had a chance. And you agreed!”

Cavan gave one of the devious smiles that always marked finally getting to the bottom of something he had been involved in. “I agreed he could never have succeeded at Kronia,” he confirmed. “But I never said anything about their making a bid for control on Earth. The warning signals were there: the SA being packed with disgruntled Terrans; the way Harvey Mitchell was pulled from the Trojan mission after I got him assigned to it. They’d always had their sights set on Earth. The whole business about calling for a say in running the Directorates was to create an appearance of legality having failed. It was the obvious target—undefended and too far away for any timely intervention.” Cavan sighed and shrugged apologetically, this time at Vicki. “Of course, I didn’t know exactly what would be called for. So I arranged to have someone there who I knew from personal previous experience would keep his head in a crisis, know how to improvise when one thing after another went wrong, and who doesn’t know how to give up. And look what he did here. How many more people do you know who could have pulled it off?”

Vicki was staring at him fixedly. “When Mitch was pulled …” she said slowly. “Robin was your substitute, wasn’t he? You’d already set him up as your insider in the SA. He told us the whole story.”

Cavan nodded candidly in a way that said there was no point in hiding anything now. “I know it caused you and Landen a lot of grief,” he said. “But we were up against professionals who knew all about infiltration and undercover techniques, and hampered by the naivete of people who were too trusting and knew nothing. I needed someone in the SA to keep tabs on what was going on. We didn’t dare let you or Landen know. It was imperative for everyone to act naturally. Especially Robin. They had dossiers going way back on everyone they recruited.”

“I didn’t even know,” Alicia informed them.

“What, exactly, did you expect Robin to do?” Keene asked.

“There was no way to be specific,” Cavan answered. “But he’s from the same kind of mold as yourself. The main thing was for him to just be there. Whatever developed, he would come up with something.”

For a moment Keene felt the beginnings of indignation. But then he remembered that what they were talking about here was something that was bigger than individuals, that he had been ready to put before himself when Jon Foy opened his eyes on that day long ago in the tower room at Foundation to the things that Kronia stood for. And in any case, would he have preferred staying back there, immersed in his own world, while Earth was lost and the whole future course of human events set on a path of repeating its same sorry saga all over again?

No. It wasn’t in his nature. His inability to strike a compromise between what was right and what wasn’t, and the accompanying compulsion to hurl himself totally into doing what needed to be done, regardless of the odds, had caused him to give up a career to spend half his life fighting the establishments of a degenerate science in the world that was gone, and to bring a dozen people out to the new world beginning. And the same qualities had emerged again, when the new world he had pledged himself to was threatened.

As Cavan had known he would.

Keene and Vicki carried on walking slowly between the glinting forms of the domes and structures after Cavan and Alicia had left them. The base didn’t look so much like a construction site these days. With the essentials taken care of, a lot of cleaning up had been going on, and Serengeti center was taking on a little style and color. Sapling trees that had been found in some of the lower regions had been brought in and replanted, and plots of grass and shrubs were being carefully nurtured. In the day, bright streaks and patches of iridescent blue in the thinning cloud were becoming commonplace, and flowers were beginning to appear in greater numbers. Beds of them were being fertilized and planted around and through the residential area.

“So did Vorse try to tempt you today with all that exciting work waiting back on Titan?” Vicki said, glancing at him. It was a veiled way of asking if he was going back to Saturn. Vicki would be staying on, to continue her work with Luthis.

Standing policy was to keep at least one long-range vessel stationed at Earth at all times. Surya had departed for Kronia some time ago with a consignment mainly of flora and fauna, but with Aztec now in orbit, the Varuna was being readied for a return trip, to be refitted to more permanent standards and equipped with Yarbat arrays. A recurring topic between Vicki and Keene had been the question of whether, with Earth’s immediate emergency now over, he would return to resume his work with Pang Yarbat’s group on Titan. Inwardly, Keene had thought he would, since that had been the pattern of his life since coming to Kronia; but he knew too that Vicki had her own personal reasons and hopes for asking, and he hadn’t wanted to deal with the issue until it became necessary. So, he had never voiced a final decision one way or the other.

But as he turned over his feelings in his mind, he became aware that somehow the equations didn’t come out the way they had before. On Earth, before and during the Athena crisis, and all through his years at Kronia, always there had been a sense of an overriding imperative that placed its own demands above personal wants and worldly things. Now, suddenly, he felt… free. It was as if some power that had laid first claim on him acknowledged that his dues were paid, and was releasing him from its service.

He was being unusually long in replying. Vicki looked at him. When he answered, it was from a completely different direction.

“Do you still have this Kronian belief that you used to talk about with Sariena, of some intelligence, guiding principle—whatever you want to call it—at work behind what goes on, shaping the way it all unfolds?”

Vicki looked surprised. “Yes—more so than ever, after what we’re finding out about living things. What… ?” But her beginning of a question trailed away, as if she saw there was no reason to complete it.

“Do you think it sometimes reaches down to individuals and enlists them to its purpose when it needs to, and lets them go when it’s done? Or do we just project outward something that’s really in ourselves?”

“Does it matter? The outcome’s still the same.”

“We might be building a civilization to go out among the stars looking for something that’s not there,” Keene said.

“Maybe it isn’t where you go, but what you have to do to get there that finds you the answers,” Vicki replied.

“The things I had to do are done,” Keene told her. “What Alicia said was right. The future we need to be thinking about now is here, not at Saturn.”

In the light from the lamps, he saw her eyes moistening. “You’re not going back with the Varuna?” she said, her voice catching.

He shook his head and slipped an arm around her waist, drawing her closer as they walked. “And anyway, you and I have got a lot of lost time to make up, haven’t we?”

“You really mean it?”

He nodded.

Vicki dropped her head against his shoulder, closed her eyes. Around them, the night breeze between the looming shadows of the base was fresh and cool, bringing a hint of rain with the scents and sounds of the new world.

The new world beginning.