CHAPTER NINE  Guardian Contact Base, Outpost

Lucille Calder was sitting in Gustav's office when he arrived the next morning. Without any preamble, she rose and spoke. "Johnson, I'm about to take a terrible risk. And I might be putting you in terrible danger. It might even be treason. I don't know. But I don't see any choice. You're the only person I can trust," she said, holding up a recording tape. "You've got to listen to this. I left the voice-activated recorder on by accident overnight, and it picked something up."

Johnson Gustav didn't know how to react. He was having an increasingly hard time knowing how to deal with Lucy. Technically, he was the officer in charge of this CI, the warden of her prison, or to put it in less prettied-up terms, her slave master. But he was also her partner in an exciting piece of research, her chief scrounger in the constant fight for equipment, the assistant coordinator of all the projects she was involved in. And whatever had brought her here this morning didn't seem likely to simplify matters. He sighed and asked, "What's going on, Luce?"

"Something that could make the war worse. Spread it to the Outposters. Johnson, I know you and I never discuss the war, or politics, unless we really have to. But I know neither of us wants the killing to spread. And it might, and I need to talk to you, and you have to listen to this goddamned recording!"

The Guardian Intelligence officer looked over the Conscripted Immigrant. It was hard, even impossible, to think in those terms about Lucy. He looked again, harder. There was barely controlled fear, even horror, in her face. Whatever this was, it was bad. And he was her friend. That much he knew, whatever the rules told him. "Okay, so I'll listen to it. You aren't the sort who'd put both of us at risk for no reason. I trust you."

"Thank you, Johnson. I hope you don't regret it." She pulled a portable recorder out of her equipment bag and slipped the tape into it.

Gustav went through the motions of filling the coffee pot and getting a pot started as Lucille fussed with the recorder, finding the right spot on the tape. Finally she found what she was after and let the tape roll. Gustav froze when he heard Romero's voice. He turned away from the coffee machine, sat down behind his desk and listened carefully, the color draining from his face. When it was over, he shook his head and spoke in a whisper. "No wonder he wanted to make this damn fool inspection trip. Jesus H. Christ. Romero, you stupid, stupid idiot."

"Johnson," Lucy said, her voice quivering on the edge of hysteria, "those bioweapons are to be pointed at my people. If Romero's idea works, I’ll have helped kill them! I can't go on with my work here and tell myself that learning to talk to the Outposters is for all humanity if the result is a thug like Romero and an alien megalomaniac sitting around planning massacres!"

She stopped, breathed in and out deeply for a moment, making a visible attempt to regain control of herself. She straightened her back and looked at Gustav, straight in the eye. "Lieutenant Gustav, on your honor—tell me the truth: Was Romero speaking for himself, or was the deal he offered Guardian policy? If the bloody Central Guardians are behind that horrible plan, you have to tell me."

Gustav felt sick inside. The last of his faith was gone.

The whole thing was rotten. He could give her a precisely truthful answer, but he knew the scuttlebutt, he knew what had been going on, he knew what manner of men had survived the purges and the shake-ups. And he knew how they would respond to Romero. He shut his eyes, cradled his face in his hands. "It is not Guardian policy," he said, his voice muffled by his hands. "Not yet. But it will be. You're right, you and I never talk politics, but I guess it's time to start. The bloody stupid bastards were wiped out on New Finland. The invasion failed. No one made it back. And every source we've got says the League will be out looking for us in force. They know we exist now, and they're scared of us. That changes everything. They know we're out here, they know we've killed a lot of people, and every resource they've got will be put into finding us. It means they will find us. Our leaders have finally admitted that to themselves, and they're in a panic."

He paused for a long moment, and then went on in a bitter, angry voice. "And our courageous, idiotic Leader of the Combined Will, General Jules Jaquet, who got us into this mess, also got himself into some very big trouble. There was a quiet little coup attempt and he just barely hung onto power. Now he's got to show he's tough and capable and ready to fight the defensive war he's forced on us, or else he's out on his ass. And the people he has to impress, the admirals and the generals and the pols, are brutal, crude. Barbarians. Jaquet and his crowd shot all the decent men still in the government, or threw them in jail. Most of the better ones resigned long ago."

"But what happens now?" Lucy asked.

"Romero's probably already en route to Capital. He'll talk up the idea of bioweapons at anyone who'll listen, and the brass are desperate enough that they will listen. Jaquet will love the idea. There is no way we can stop them. They have the auto-translators, and people who know O-1. The situation is completely out of our control. Oh, I could hand you some piece of nonsense that maybe the government wouldn't stoop that low, but the Centrals are scared

silly. They'll try anything." Gustav suddenly slammed his fist down onto the desk. "The stupid, stupid, fools! We have no idea about these Outposters, what they are, what they think, what they want—and the higher-ups want to give them lessons in how to kill humans and wreck ships!"

Lucy stared at him. She knew, and Gustav knew, that he had just crossed a point of no return. He should have had her arrested for spying, had her confined already, the recording destroyed. "Thank you for telling the truth, Johnson. And thank you for having the decency to be horrified."

"I wish I wasn't so easy to horrify," Gustav growled. "I'd sleep better. But wait a second—is there any hope on the other end? Is there any chance that the Outposters can't do it? That they can't deliver?"

Lucy thought hard for a moment and shrugged. She felt very tired. "I don't know, and I don't think any of your technicians or scientists could answer that—"

"And even if they could, I couldn't risk asking them. Loyal Guardians all. No Settlers here, thank you. Besides me, I suppose."

"What's a Settler?"

"People back home on Capital who want to plant some crops there instead of trying to conquer the universe. Not important now. But the point is we can't ask the techs." I trust C'astille," Lucy said suddenly, firmly.

"How? Why? Isn't she one of these Nihilists or whatever that religion of D'etallis's is?"

"It's not a religion, or a philosophy. And C'astille isn't one of them. She’s a sojourner."

"Say again?"

"A sojourner," Lucy said. "I don't quite understand it all myself, so I can't explain it very well. Nihilism is a Group, and a Group is sort of a small nation, or sub-nation, except territory isn't involved, and I have no clear ideas about what the supernation is that oversees it all. Anyway, let's say you didn't like your Group, that you didn't agree with the ideas the Group shared. You'd leave

and get on the road and find another Group. Easy to do. They have excellent roads, and communications are good. You know they have radio, and the equivalents of books and maps. If you find a Group you agree with, you can drift into it as it travels the road. If you disagree, you vote with your feet again and find some other Group, until you're travelling with a crowd that thinks the way you do. And they certainly travel. All the phrases and sayings about roads and journeys show how important movement is to them. It's very unusual for Outposters to stay in one place as long as they have here, incidentally; we're important to them. And since the Nihilists have us, that makes the Nihilists important, and they've attracted a lot of new members who are curious about us. And lost a few who just got restless and hit the road again."

"But you were explaining why you could trust C'astille," Gustav said.

"Right, I'm getting there, but it takes so much background ..." It seemed strange to be giving a lecture on Outposter society at a time like this, but Johnson had to understand. "More or less in what corresponds to late adolescence, a young Outposter is expected to wander off from his Group and spend time travelling with other Groups. Sort of exchange students, I suppose. A wanderjahr. They aren't expected to join the other Groups, though they can if they wish. Usually, you finish your sojourn and go find your birth-Group. And C'astille speaks of her Group, which is north of here at the moment, as if she still wants to get back there someday. She definitely has no interest in being a Nihilist. And before you ask, as far as I can make it out, a Nihilist is someone who believes in committing suicide before going mad, or suffering senility, or something. Apparently there's a high incidence of mental disease among the elderly. They don't like to talk about it much, and when they do it's pretty oblique stuff, even for Outposters. C'astille very strongly does not believe in Nihilism. She was more or less just passing through when we landed, and she stayed around out of curiosity. I might

add that she seemed worried when the old leader died and this D'etallis took over."

"Do you think we could talk to C'astille? Play her the tape, ask her if such bioweapons were possible?"

"Yes—and more than that. I think we owe it to her. Don't forget, in exchange, D'etallis wants human weapons to attack Outposters. The other Groups have to be warned."

"Then let's find her," Gustav said, rising.

"Okay," Lucy said, and suddenly the brittle calm that had sustained her collapsed. She felt afraid, more afraid than she had been since the Venera was hijacked. "Johnson? If it's true—what can we do about it?"

Johnson Gustav looked at the coffee maker. He had forgotten to switch it on. "I don't know, Lucy. We need time to think. But we're in this, even if we don't like it. Let's get suited up and find our friend."

They found C'astille without too much difficulty. She was fascinated by all things human, especially construction, and was developing into a highly qualified sidewalk superintendent. It had been getting more and more difficult to find a place to land supply craft as the Contact Base grew, and so a team of Guardian Army engineers was pouring a reinforced concrete landing pad in a nearby clearing. Suspecting that the native would take an interest in the proceedings, Gustav and Lucy drove a jeep over to look for her, and sure enough, C'astille was there to watch the engineers at work.

C'astille was glad to see Lucy, and surprised to see Gustav. For his part, Gustav was just as glad to find C'astille well away from the main camp and prying eyes.

"C'astille! We need talk with you," Lucy called in O-l as she jumped from the jeep. She stumbled just a bit as she hit the ground—she had never gotten exactly graceful in a pressure suit, even in one of the lightweight models they had finally gotten. A few of the Guardians engineers went without suits at all, and just used respirators or air helmets. But Outpost smelled a lot worse than it looked. That incredibly rich moldy odor crept past any respirator seal, and permeated any clothing worn outdoors. It was easier to go with a suit and leave the smell in the airlock. And it made you a lot more popular in crowded areas. Even with airlocks and filters, enough Outposter air leaked into the mess hall to make it smell like a pile of steaming compost. But noses got used to it.

C'astille waved—a habit she had picked up from the humans—and trotted over to Lucy.

"Hello, Lucille and Johnson. I am glad to see you," C'astille said carefully. She was justifiably proud of the English she had learned. She did better than any other Outposter. Lucy was by this time convinced there was no single cause for the problems the 'Posters had with English. It was a combination of the sounds they could produce, and language construction, and viewpoint, and who knows what else. Lucy often wondered how bad her own O-l accent was, though now wasn't the time to worry about it. But C’astille’s Aussie-flavored English was an odd touch of home.

"C'astille," she said in the native language. "You are sensed. M'Gustav and I are here for talk. He does not have many words of your tongue, but of course can hear and talk through the translator machine he carries." She paused. How to explain? "We have accidentally learned a thing, and it is most urgent that we know if it is true or not. Come take a little walk with us."

C'astille looked at the two of them. Something was strange. Then it came to her. They had something to say they wanted no one else to hear, not even other humans. The idea was exciting. "Fine," she said, eagerly sweeping the ground with her tail. "The forest is safe of Hungry Ones for a good distance. Let us be in the trees."

Lucy began to speak as the three figures moved into the brush. "We want you to listen to a recording of talk between your Guidance and ours. The recording happened accidentally, no one sought to ah, hear this, but it happened, and when it was heard. ..." Lucy found her voice trailing off as she ran out of excuses.

"It happened. It doesn't matter how it came to be," C'astille said.

Lucy shrugged. If C'astille didn't mind, she wasn't going to argue. She wasn't even too surprised that C'astille wasn't upset at a case of spying on her leader. It fit with the Outposter viewpoint, somehow. "So, listen." She un-slung her equipment bag, dug out the recorder, and punched the play button.

C'astille bent her head forward to hear better and stood, stock still, while the voices of human, Z'ensam, and the translator machine talked.

Finally the tape ran out. She gave a low snorting noise, shifted on her feet, and said, "I have heard. What more would you know?" Her voice was suddenly flat and nasal, her whole body seemed strangely stiff and unmoving.

"Can your people make such creatures, that will eat such things?"

She wobbled her head back and forth on its long neck, a nervous fidgeting movement. "Yes, we can. As D'etallis said, it would be easy to change them from creatures we already have. This does not mean we should. Your people have no experience of our fighting. There would be great destruction."

Gustav thought of nuclear bombs, lasers, automatic weapons, and spoke through the translator for the first time. "The same could be said of your people fleeing our weapons."

"D'etallis seeks power and control and the expansion of her Group," C'astille said. "She is a dangerous person, and I do not doubt that she would be willing to use any weapon she could get at, against anyone she could get. If she gets a weapon from D'Romero, she will not hesitate to turn it on Romero. What drives your Guidance to do this foolish thing?"

"In all accuracy, we must call him M'Romero, for he is no true Guidance, no Leader," Lucy said. "He will go to those in power, and seek power from them in exchange for the living weapons."

"This should not be what occurs." C'astille said.

Lucy couldn't tell if C'astille was simply speaking in the normal passive voice of O-l, or if she was deliberately speaking ambiguously, trying to learn what the humans felt before she gave too much away. "M'Gustav and I agree. But we do not know how to stop it. M'Romero is gone, and has already spread his message—and D'etalhs will have done the same."

"Yes. She would not wait," the Outposter agreed. "Then we must warn others. I must be with my Group and give warning. But I have no understanding of you two. Is not M'Romero of your Group?"

Lucy paused again. How to explain? There wasn't time for the complicated truth of the League and the Guards and Gustav's Settlers, whoever they were. But she couldn't lie. "We do not share the words for me to make all clear, and accurate. But this is close to truth: I am not of M'Romero's group, the Guardians. I am a sojourner, like you. I travelled here against my will, and was delighted to find your people at the end of the trip. I have helped these Guardians to speak with you, because I was curious and sought knowledge, but I can do so no longer. These weapons will be used against my Group, and so I have hurt my own people. I must stop."

"I am of the Guardians," Gustav said, his translator's words carrying none of the complicated emotion Lucy could hear in his own voice, "but I must take a new road, try and stop what the Guardians would do. Lucy's Group is at war with mine. If my Group attacks her with terrible new weapons, that will only make her side strike back at my side the harder. No good can come of making that war bigger. And there must not be war with your species helping to kill mine, or my species helping to kill yours. Begin that now, and humans might be trapped into hating your kind, being afraid of you. And they might decide to kill all of you," he said, and then hesitated. "Which they could do.'

"I believe you, human. But I have often sensed that you think us not as clever as you, because you can do things we cannot, or because you choose to do things we choose not to do. I understand your people are spread across the sky, and our astronomy is good: I know how vast the sky is. But our machines are living things that grow, and breed, and reproduce. If we make two, we have made millions. D'etallis has a strange vision of Nihilism. The idea has been passive, she would make it active. Again, you and I do not share the words to say why, but she seeks to kill all the Z'ensam, all the Outposters. When she had only the weapons and the knowledge of all Z'ensam, she was no great danger. The other Groups could counter her moves. With human machines behind her, she will walk far down that killing road. But do not imagine you are safe in all your worlds. You must understand, and believe, hard though it might be. If she became the leader of all the Z'ensam, and decided her ideas called for the death of humans, she could kill all of you."

The two humans were silent.

"I believe you, C'astille," Lucy said at last.

"That is good. But what is to be done?" C'astille asked.

"I have to stop my work here, immediately," Lucy said. "The best hope we have is delay, and the only way to delay is by not helping. There are very few records that haven't been copied or passed along yet. Not more than a day or two's worth. Those can be destroyed."

'Can the two of you fake things?" Gustav asked. "Create confusion with bad translations or something?"

"No," C'astille said. "There are too many others who would find the mistakes too soon. M'Calder is right. All we can do is stop. And then I must leave for my Group, warn them."

"That'll have you safe. But what about M'Calder?" Gustav said. "I can cover for you for a few days, Lucy. Maybe you could fake being sick, or something. But then what?

Lucy shifted her feet, tried to scratch her nose, and bounced her fingers off the pressure suit's helmet. She wished they could sit down comfortably and think and talk. But the only place where all three of them could be comfortable was the Crystal Palace, and that wasn't safe. She shifted to English, and let Gustav's translator keep C'astille up to date. "Can I pretend to be sick enough to be pulled back to Ariadne?"

Gustav thought about it and shrugged. "I suppose. We don't have a real doctor down here. But what's the point?"

"Well, you said that the League was bound to find us, sooner or later. When? How long do we have?"

Gustav made a vague gesture with his hands. "Tomorrow. Ten years from now. They've got a lot of ground to cover. But now we've given them a reason to make the effort."

"Okay, I'm thinking out loud. Suppose we gave C'astille some sort of homing beacon. Something that would give out a signal we could track on a frequency the Guards aren't likely to monitor. Then she could go off with her Group and we could find her later on."

"Yeah, so?"

"So when the League arrives, they're going to want someone who can talk to the Outposters, and they'll want some Outposters to talk to. I could be their link, their ticket in. Say I get caught without a helmet and get carbon-dioxide poisoning. I get sent to Ariadne, deathly ill. The doctor there looks me over, and pokes me and prods me and makes me feel better. When I recover, I steal a lander and make a break for it. I land near C'astille's beacon and wait for the League. When they come, I contact them."

"How?"

"If the lander's still functional, I fly. If not, the lander's radio, or the 'Posters have radio."

"But what about life support? For years and years, probably? You can't eat Outposter food. You'd die of carbon-dioxide poisoning if you tried to breath their air.

0You'd have to live in the ship, or a pressure suit. And those would give out."

"Pauze," C'astille said, having a little trouble with the English word before she shifted to O-l. "If I have understanding, there is no problem. Our people could provide air and food that would suit you. Be sure of it."

"There you are, Johnson. Do you think I could get away? Don't forget, Ariadne s radar operators are all CIs."

"Mmmph. I had almost forgotten that. With that working for you, and if we timed it just right, you'd have a chance, though God knows you could be shot down for real."

"I almost don't mind that. I just want to be safely dead in the eyes of the Guardians. I don't want them to come looking for me to get more out of me."

"And suppose you really end up dead? Will you feel better then? Getting yourself killed won't undo what's happened."

"I know that! But I—"

"Lucy, listen to me! You did not deliberately hurt anyone. You were trapped here, in our star system, with no way out, ever, and you lucked into an exciting chance that should have had nothing to do with war. You were learning a language, and it's not your fault what is said in that language. You weren't telling me where League bases were, or building bombs—"

"Johnson! Stop it! I know I didn't do it intentionally, but facts are facts, I must live all my life knowing that my people are going to die because of what I did in all my innocence. I betrayed my trust—"

"Then you are not alone," C'astille said in O-l. "I choose you grotesque aliens over my own kind, and side with you against the leader of the Group that protects me. And M'Gustav deliberately chooses to betray his Group. You are the lucky of we three: You betrayed by accident. M'Gustav and I know what we are doing before we do it. But we are all traitors."

And all the pretty speeches and ethical standards and codes of honor and ideas about right and wrong won't change that, Gustav thought. "Lucy. I'm sorry. I think your plan might work. You know what you're asking of yourself. You could easily get killed or be marooned somewhere on Outpost and watch your air run out. But I think we have to try it."

"But where does it leave you?" Lucy asked.

"I don't know. They might catch me and shoot me. If not, I'll still be here, or on Ariadne."

"Run things,  then.  Stay alive.  I'm burning all my bridges. One of us should keep some options open."

"You're pretty easy on me."

"Gustav, you are my enemy. We are at war, you and I. But I want you alive, and well. I'd feel a hundred time worse a traitor if I got you killed."

C'astille looked on in confusion as M'Calder took M'Gustav's hand in hers and squeezed it, for the briefest of moments, before she let it go. The two humans looked at each other in a most peculiar way for a moment, then drew apart, seemingly very upset about something.

"It can't be, Lucy. But God, I—no, I can't even say it."

"Neither can I, Johnson. Neither can I. We'd better get back before they miss us." The humans said their goodbyes to C'astille, arranged to talk with her the next day, and went back to the jeep.

C'astille, watching them go, could make nothing of it. But there was something about that moment when the two humans touched that seemed perverse, as if the two of them wanted to—but C'astille couldn't think that, even to herself. Alien or not, they couldn't be monsters. And there was something else that disturbed her greatly. The translator hadn't be able to make complete sense of the English-spoken conversation, and she had to take that into account. Yet she had gotten the strong impression that the humans were discussing medicine—and not as a bizarre, horrifying, and dangerous thing, but as something quite normal and routine.

She started back toward the clearing where the engineers were still hard at work. Every time she thought she was used to the humans, had finally made sense of them, this sort of thing happened. Only in the last few weeks had she become certain that they were all one species, instead of a vast number of related species that worked together. But they varied so much, in height and size and color and shape, and in a hundred details. No animals species on her planet had such a wide range of variation. She had thought for a time that they were all mutations from some true breed, and she had worked out a complicated social theory to account for it, of a race that got some use out of its mutants and sports by sending them on risky jobs of exploring and so forth. But that hadn't made a great deal of sense, and all the humans seemed far healthier than mutations usually were. There was a lot to learn about them, and learn from them. If D'etallis didn't wipe them out first.