He paused.
"Is this bad?" Vera prompted.
"I don't know," Gordon replied. "I can only tell you this: the one at the very front was absolutely, obviously Saba."
CHAPTER 13
ROSS HAD SEEN that expression on Gordon's face before— when Travis Fox was finally listed officially as "missing in action," and given up by the officials at the Project.
"You tried her on the transmitter?" Ross asked, indicating his belt com.
"I pulsed her," Gordon said. "She did pulse me back. But when I tried voice, all I got was noise. There must be some kind of sophisticated digital jammer operating, forbidding communication above a certain level of complexity."
Ross said nothing for a moment, considering the level of technology needed to jam a spread-spectrum com system, something impossible to Terran science.
"A statue of Saba… in this time," Eveleen said slowly.
Ross turned to his wife, who paced back and forth along the wall of the tiny room. She looked up. "It must mean that we're going to be making another jump, only farther back."
"To when First Team disappears," Vera said, nodding. "We were all hoping we'd be going back to rescue them, weren't we?"
"If it is safe to do so," Irina said in her precise voice. "We do not go back until we are assured that it will not destroy the timeline."
"Well, I hope to," Eveleen said, then grimaced. "That is, to make it plain, I hope that it transpires that we've already been back there and rescued them and that's why they disappeared. Does that make sense?" She made a face, rubbing her forehead. "Sheesh! I do hate thinking in possible timelines, it scrambles my brain!"
Ross nodded, appreciating his wife's attempt to lighten the tension, but Gordon's expression did not change.
"We're not going backward or forward in time without Saba," Gordon said. "I won't leave her in there."
"You can't get in?" Ross asked.
"Tried." Gordon shook his head. "Tried offers, questions, and even a challenge—and it almost got me lynched. So I beat a retreat, figuring if I pushed it any harder, it might only jeopardize Saba. Came back here, found a room at the top of this Nurayil dorm. It's a long walk up the ramp, but from its window I can see the House of Knowledge."
"Now that was a good idea," Ross said, his mind rapidly developing—and then discarding—possible plans. They simply didn't know enough. But one thing was for certain: being able to watch the House of Knowledge had to be an advantage. "Didn't you and Saba work out some codes on the com, for just in case?"
"We did," Gordon said. "Mostly voice codes, but some pulse ones as well."
Irina sat silently, frowning, her mouth in a straight line. Next to her, Vera smiled and shook her curly head. "It might not be so bad come morning. We know she's alive, at least."
Gordon nodded slowly. "We'll give it a few days. Say, a week, unless there's an emergency. Settle in, gather data. Then meet—all of us, including Misha and Viktor, if we can get them—to review our strategy."
"Sounds like a plan," Ross said. "Come on, let's chow down. No one can rest, or think, with an empty gut. And I don't know about you, but we put in a day of hard work."
He pushed a portion of the food toward Gordon, and was relieved when the professor took it and began methodically to eat.
Eveleen gave them a cheery smile. "Hard labor indeed. You can tell those rail-skimmers are old. Unless today was a real gift from Murphy, they must break down all the time."
Gordon swung his head toward the Russian women. "And you?"
"We are now gatherers," Irina said. "It appears that eating establishments will hire on their preferred gatherers, and one can then get prepared food as well as work credit."
Vera said, "We'll find out which places make the sorts of things we can eat, and zero in on them. No one has noticed our field analyzers, and we're going to be careful to do it when no one else is around. In the meantime, we walk about with our gatherers' tools and listen. A few challenges, but no one took any interest in beings from Fire Mountain Enclave."
"None in us either," Eveleen said.
"Good." Gordon finished his share and got to his feet. "Let's meet tomorrow night and compare notes."
Everyone agreed, and very soon Gordon and the Russians departed, leaving Ross and Eveleen together in the tiny cell.
They looked at each other.
"Alone at last," she said with a tired grin as she held her arms out. "It's not the Yilayil honeymoon suite—"
"Privacy," Ross murmured into her soft hair, "ranks it up there over any luxury penthouse on Earth."
"Privacy," Eveleen said, laughing.
* * *
COLD SHOCK NUMBED Saba as she thought of those tall, carved wood statues before the House of Knowledge—and her face on the foremost one.
"This means I've been here."
It was the only possible explanation. She sat in the room that the guardians of the House of Knowledge had brought her to, trying to clear her mind and plan. Except her mind refused to work. So she looked around. The walls were plain, except for paintings that looked very old; she sat on a low couch made of some woven material that felt like flax.
How long had she been here? She glanced at her chrono. An hour and a half.
She sat back, closing her eyes—but then the door opened, one of the green beings, who seemed to be the guardians of the House, entered and beckoned to her.
She said nothing as she rose and walked out of the room.
Fast Yilayil voices exchanged ritual greetings around her— vying, apparently, for the honor of escorting her inside. She knew she ought to be listening, and she caught a few words. Someone trilled something about making a place in readiness, but she lost track of the rest of the statement. Her mind could not veer from that image of her own face, in a time when she supposedly had never been.
When? What had happened?
Someone addressed her: "Saba-music-maker of Far Star is welcome at last to the Yil."
To "the people." Not to any specific ones—Nurayil or Yilayil. They definitely knew who she was. That meant she had already accomplished something.
The first realization banished that earlier image of women from some distant planet that happened to resemble her. The second realization made her heart pound.
If I have been here, she thought, then I know I will have left myself some kind of message. I know it as well as I know myself. Somehow, I must find it, so that I can accomplish what must be done, and protect the integrity of time.
So deciding, she felt inner conviction at last, and with it the ability to think—to assess.
She turned her attention to her surroundings.
Cool, dry air was her first awareness. The second was the glare-free light, from some hidden source. The walls were plain, as had been that parlor to which she'd initially been brought.
Before her stood two robed beings, one tall and spidery, the other feline, with sleek black fur everywhere except the face. The latter spoke.
"We, Rilla and Virigu, teachers of the House of Knowledge, now welcome Saba of the Far Star. We are teachers of deportment."
Saba knew the response to that. "I, Saba of the Far Star, am ready to learn deportment." If nothing else, this would buy her time.
"Saba now come with us." Rilla's voice was scratchy, her whistles weak, but she was understandable.
The Virigu had not yet spoken. Saba gave the spidery being a glance, remembering what the First Team had said about these creatures; they all bore the name Virigu, and they were the highest-ranking Nurayil in that they were involved with all levels of technology.
Saba was led up a curving ramp. "We are females," Rilla went on. "We wear robes which symbolize our dedication to Knowledge."
Saba said nothing. She felt her belt communicator buzzing against her hip, but she did not move her hands to it to acknowledge Gordon's call, not with these two beings watching her. Though so far Rilla and Virigu had behaved with respect, the fact that she had been taken he
re without being asked indicated she might in fact be in danger.
"We protect you," Virigu trilled, an uncanny parallel to Saba's thoughts. "We teach you."
They paused at a landing, and Saba paused as well. She glanced down, saw a splendid mosaic far below, on the ground floor. It depicted the night sky, and constellations not even remotely familiar.
Rilla moved again, leading the way. Saba was distracted momentarily by the swaying of a long, luxurious black tail among the draperies of Rilla's robe.
They paused before a door. Saba noted that it was alone on a corridor, with a blank wall adjacent. Virigu pointed to her hand with a long, chitinous digit. She then indicated a silver plate next to the door, and Saba pressed her hand against it.
A series of tiny lights rippled, and the door slid open.
All three passed inside a small room furnished with a low couch. On one wall faded paintings made a complicated scene; on the other lines promised some kind of furnishings now folded away.
"You domicile here," Rilla said. She touched a control panel on the blank wall, and a kind of storage enclosure slid out. Saba saw what looked like a stepladder of boxes, each with a tiny light gleaming above a control button at one corner. "Robes," Rilla added, pressing the control on the topmost box. It folded silently out, showing two of the flaxen robes neatly folded.
Saba nodded, unmoving. She was not going to change in front of these others unless she could not avoid it. She did not want to risk exposing, and then losing, her belt com, which she wore inside her overalls.
"We leave, you come to us for eat, we begin to learn," Rilla said, and with a swish of robes, the two left.
Before she did anything, Saba looked around the room. Was she being monitored? She realized that there was nothing obvious—nothing she could identify, so she might as well dismiss that worry for now.
Instead, she explored the room, first touching the controls on each of the storage boxes. Some of the implements she could only guess at; others seemed to be universal—a hairbrush. A toothbrush, though shaped differently. There was a box with a plate and Yilayil instructions. She puzzled out the script, then took off her boot and placed her foot on it. Lights rippled, and a moment later a slipper appeared from a slot in the back of the box, twin in color and material to those she'd seen on Rilla's feet.
She pressed the master control and the boxes all folded neatly away into the wall, leaving only faint lines to indicate where they were. She moved to a control near the corner; this one seemed to control something that extended from floor to ceiling.
She positioned herself directly before the control, touched it, and this time the wall slid back and a tiny alcove appeared, encompassing the corner of the room. She saw a recycle unit, a large frame that reminded her somewhat of the globe ship's sonic "shower," and a sink with a water faucet.
When that slid away, she tried the last control, and found herself with a desk and wall monitor. The keypads were utterly different than Terran keyboards.
But it was unmistakably a computer. Was it her own? Was there protected space on it? This would take exploring—the entire room required careful examination. She knew that if she had any opportunity whatsoever, she would leave herself some kind of message, no matter how brief or crude. Something.
But that would have to wait. They apparently expected her to rejoin them in the House.
First she took out her belt com, and tried to raise Ashe. Nothing but static—inconvenient, but not unexpected. She tried the pulse—and a few moments later she got a return pulse.
So. She tapped out the code for "I'm well" and "I'm investigating." A moment later she got the expected answer: "I received your message."
Communication! For a moment she felt a strong urge to sit down and fumble her way through the other codes they'd developed—except she still did not know who might be listening, by whatever means. The whole idea behind the codes was quick exchanges, fast enough not to trip some kind of high-tech monitoring system.
Likewise she did not know how long Rilla and Virigu would wait for her without coming back to investigate.
So she changed into the robe, used the alcove to freshen up, and passed her clothing through the "shower" experimentally. It seemed to work on clothes as well as on people. She checked the water with a tool that Zina had issued to each team member; it registered as pure H20. She tasted a sip from a cup that she found waiting—handleless, but unmistakably a drinking cup—and found that the water reminded her of pure, almost tasteless distilled water.
Did all the beings here, then, need light, water, and…
And harmony?
It was time to find out.
She dressed again in her overalls, but put one of the robes on over them. Her belt com went right back on her belt under the robe, but she stowed her pack—with her laptop—in the lowest of the closet boxes, as she'd mentally named them.
Then it was time to go to work.
CHAPTER 14
THE NEXT FEW days were so much alike that they later blurred in memory.
Each morning Ross and Eveleen left their little cell and walked across the Nurayil district of the port city. Sometime during that first night, a heavy cloud bank had moved in, and a light but steady rain began to fall—without, apparently, surcease.
Ross felt at first that this was a blessing. The rain cooled the humid air slightly, but more importantly it drenched the overpowering scents emanating from the vast jungle bordering the Nurayil area. His sinuses cleared; the heavy smell of wet pavement was preferable to the millions of sweet perfumes.
At the Transport facility, he and Eveleen worked hard, almost continually, alongside numerous other beings descended from a variety of races. Virigu seldom spoke to anyone, but watched continually. Some beings did very little, and no one said anything. Ross and Eveleen kept at their jobs— and by the second day, they saw that good workers would be promoted to other sections.
Their goal was to pilot the rail-skimmers so that they could enable the team to be able to move about undetected, should movement be needed. If they could only become drivers through promotion, then they would continue to work hard.
Most of their fellow workers kept to themselves, or stayed strictly with those of their own land, but not all. At the one break officially designated, at midday, there was some chatter among a few beings—while little gray Moova circulated through with vending carts, selling an astonishing variety of foods.
Ross noted that the Moova had palm plates on their vending machines: there did not seem to be any kind of coinage or money in other forms. Just the unknown credit as registered by the palm plates.
The mealtime conversation was seldom interesting, but it was good practice in following the language—especially as used by a variety of beings with different types of mouths and vocal structures. Some of the whistles were thin and piercing, others curiously liquid. One set of beings sounded like oboes; lacking a name for them, Eveleen and Ross in private referred to them as the music people.
They both noticed that even among those beings who stayed close to their own kind, no one spoke anything but Yilayil. Ross and Eveleen were careful to do the same, if there was any remote chance of being overheard. It was sometimes frustrating, but at least he was with Eveleen, whose spirits were irrepressibly high. She attacked the work with vigor and interest, and she seemed to regard the world without fear.
As Ross once had. He tried to regain that carefree sense of adventure, but Eveleen's presence triggered that protective instinct. He was always on the watch for danger—something he was careful to hide.
Each evening, Irina, Vera, and Gordon joined them in Ross and Eveleen's room—theirs being the first one of the Terrans along that ramp.
At first, no one had much of anything to report. Gordon had exchanged some brief communications with Saba, who— not surprisingly—seemed to be "learning deportment" as well. He had not heard from Misha and his partner.
The two Russian women were at least as busy as Ros
s and Eveleen at their jobs. The rest of their time they spent trying to listen to the conversations around them, without trespassing against "proper deportment." Vera did her best to get the beings she encountered talking; Irina listened, and took copious notes on her laptop. She did that at the nightly sessions as well, something that bothered Ross slightly at first, but then he decided it was her way of approaching her own part of the mission, and so he tuned her out. Eveleen didn't seem to mind. She kept up her martial-arts practice every night, whether the others were around or not.
"They all talk so fast," Ross said one night. "And there's so much we hadn't been able to learn about this language. We're still having a tough time at Transport."
"It reminds me of English lessons," Vera said with a grin. "Four years in school, and I thought I was so good with this tongue. But then my schoolmates and I were taken on a trip to England, and—ha! Everyone talked so quick, and with slang, it made my head spin! So much I found that I didn't know."
"A good time, then, to compare notes," Gordon put in. "Here is a challenge I heard today between the guardians of the House of Knowledge and a pair of those gray-skinned beings who look a little like tree stumps with extra eyes—"
"Moova," Irina said. "We found out today. The Moova all take a very great interest in foods."
"Moova," Gordon repeated. "I'll remember. Here's the exchange."
And he whistle/droned, in quick fashion, a long pattern to which they all listened intently.
"What's that tense?" Vera asked. " Time-as-was.
"Sounds like a mixture of time-as-was/to come."
"Conditional?" Ross asked, trying to concentrate.
"No." Gordon shook his head. "Conditional goes like this—" He demonstrated, and Ross remembered the lesson.
"Then what is this new tense?" Irina asked. "Or is it merely some kind of shortcut?"
"We'll have to be on the listen for more of these shortcuts," Eveleen suggested in a grim voice as she moved through a kata. "In case they have a third meaning that the First Team never caught onto."