The afternoon had been sunlit, with warm, still air. Jef sneezed suddenly, rubbed his nose in some perplexity and sneezed again. He looked around himself for a cause, but could see nothing different except a line of dark clouds, led by an anvil shape of strong thunderheads building up on the horizon to the west.
As he watched, however, the dark cloud-line spread rapidly forward. Evidently, the clouds were being driven almost directly in this direction. He stood watching them, his pacing forgotten. A gust of much cooler air, running before the shade that the cloud-bank was now spreading over the countryside to the west, seemed to clear his mind of the roiling emotions that had been troubling it. The clouds boiled on, their leading edge forming changing shapes that his imagination could translate into towers and mountain valleys, horse heads and crocodiles. The cloud edge spread to cover the sun and he saw its shadow race suddenly across the lawn of Armage's house and envelop him in a gentle twilight.
A melancholy seemed to ride the pinions of the gathering squall. A not unpleasant melancholy. Jef felt himself caught up in the interaction of the land and the weather, drawn into an action nostalgic and sad but, in its own way, beautiful. The clouds had covered all the sky now, as he watched; and the first gust of rain flew about him. But he did not retreat from it into the house, or back under the meager shelter of the narrow porch roof. Instead, he stood there, feeling a pleasure in the wind, and the touch of the raindrops, even as the wind strengthened.
It came harder out of the west. The rain was a downpour suddenly; and in an instant his shirt was soaked to him like another skin. Thunder cracked in the clouds, and all at once the rain was not rain, but hail, pearled spheres descending, bouncing on the lawn and lying glinting in the dimmed light.
Now he did move back, reluctantly, under the porch roof out of the direct fall of the hail. The wind, sounding about the house, the loud pattering of the hail on the steps and the porch floor, as well as on the roof overhead, blended so that he could almost imagine it making a music—music that seemed to sing of hope and tragedy combined, of beauty and sorrow.
There was a struggle in the song of the storm sounds, but it was a good struggle, a natural struggle, like the struggle of a child and its mother in the birth process. The gusts of wind were strong now and the hail was large. It hammered the ground. The wind tore at the false pillars of the house and the clouds streamed by overhead with rollings of thunder. Gradually, as the minutes went by and he watched, the volume of the storm song diminished, the hail began to give way to simple rain, heavily falling. The overcast lightened and the wind dropped, dropped, until it was hardly noticeable at all; and the main theme of the song was only in the steady drumming of rain on the porch roof.
The rain slowed. The overcast lightened even more... and far on the western horizon he began to see a thinning and breaking of the clouds, a clearing with blue sky beginning to show through. The clear sky grew and approached. The rain dwindled and ended, and fifteen minutes later the fleeing overcast uncovered the sun once more, so that golden light shone down all around on lawn and trees, now shining with wetness and still pearled with occasional unmelted hailstones, scattered here and there.
Jef took a deep breath. For a moment he had been one with the storm, had been a part of its forces, a part of this planet. He felt cleansed and freshly at peace with himself and the situation that held him. He turned and went back upstairs to his room.
Chapter Four
"I'll be right downstairs," Jef said to Mikey a little later. "I shouldn't be gone more than three hours at the most."
He went out, locking the door of his room behind him, and took the ramp down to the ground floor of the house, which was already noisy with the voices of the guests gathered in the main sitting room. Tibur had brought him a printout list of those invited, with pictures opposite the names, and he had made an effort to memorize these, but there was no telling whether his memory might not desert him when it came to meeting the actual people. He had never been very social; and the prospect of making small talk with thirty or forty strangers who had no real reason to be interested in him, was not attractive. This dinner, after all, was obviously being given to honor and curry favor with a John Smith. If there had been any polite way to do so, Jef would have stayed in his room with Mikey.
At the foot of the ramp he put the list in the pocket of his jacket and went into the sitting room, pausing just inside the doorway. No one there seemed to have noticed his entrance. They were involved in conversational clusters about the room. His sensitivity, heightened by solitary habits and the empathic bond he had developed with Mikey over the years, gave him a feeling of things hidden, of the ugliness of some imminent explosion waiting below the surface chatter going on in the room. Tibur was behind a table set up as a bar in one corner, and for lack of something better to do immediately, Jef went over to it.
"And what would you like to drink, Mr. Robini?" Tibur asked.
"Anything. What do you have in the way of beer?" Jef asked.
"You might like to try our Everon City ale."
"Fine," said Jef. "Thanks."
He accepted a tall glass of a bitter malt beverage with a thick head of foam. Sipping it, he turned to look the room over again.
What was most noticeable about the people assembled there was that they could hardly have been told from a similar group at cocktails back on Earth. The interesting reason for this was that here, light years from Earth, most of these colonists were wearing the latest in Earth styles and fashions. On a world this recently planted, this could happen only in two ways. One would have been if all the individuals in the room had been back to Earth in the last year or so, and had a chance to update their wardrobes while they were there. Another would have been the existence of a black market, or at least a grey one, in late-fashion clothes that were being imported instead of the customary equipment and other supplies. Earth did not care what it shipped out to new worlds like this; but Jef would have expected that somewhere outside this room there were colonists who cared more for improving their planet than for the latest fashions.
Beyond the fact that those here were, as a group, dressed in style—and not inexpensively so—their common denominator seemed to be an age level running from the late twenties to the late forties. Men and women both—and their number seemed about equally divided as to sex—they had a sort of capable, almost brutal, look. Perhaps, thought Jef, watching from the drink table, this was only natural, seeing the jobs they held. The guest list he had been given had read like a catalogue of the people controlling Everon. There might be individuals important on this world who were not here this evening. Certainly there were none here who were not important.
Clearly, however, the one who outranked them all was Martin. Unlike Jef, who would have preferred to go unnoticed all evening, Martin seemed to be enjoying the attention he was getting. Some of it barely stopped short of fawning, yet Martin appeared to be taking it all at face value. They're making a fool of him, thought Jef, and his inner sad bitterness stirred at the observation. He also noticed, as he assumed Martin had not, how the whole gathering was quietly being orchestrated by the Constable who moved soft-footedly and continually among the guests, putting in a comment here, a laugh there.
Martin was at the center of a little knot of six or eight people. He shared a sofa with a woman Jef's guest list had identified as Yvis Suchi, an organic chemist and one of the original officers of the Masters of Everon corporation. She was a tall individual in her thirties, wearing a sort of fuchsia pants-suit, thin and quick of gesture, with a wide mouth, narrow lips and a particularly carrying voice, even when she seemed to be trying to use it confidentially. One of her hands held a drink, the other kept hold of a leash connected to a brilliant-studded collar around a lemurlike creature just under a meter in height, one of the native Everon fauna. It was an omnivore—Jef could not remember its scientific name, although most of the larger species on the planet had been catalogued on the original survey.
; The colonists, according to Jef's studies, called such a creature a jimi. It was easily tamed and housebroken; its small paws with opposed thumbs could manipulate anything a human hand the same size could manage; and the jimis were quick to learn fairly complicated physical routines. However, they were docile to the point of dullness and outside of their manipulative abilities seemed to have not much more intelligence than a dog of Earth. There was another jimi present. Across the room another woman, named Calabria deWinter and wearing a wide-collared blue suit, stood holding a leash that kept her pet close beside her. DeWinter was also tall, but fifteen or twenty kilos overweight, grey-haired and with a round, unlined face that would have fitted a much younger body. Beside her, her jimi looked small and fragile—it also looked different from Suchi's jimi in a way that Jef could not identify until it suddenly struck him that deWinter's jimi was female— Suchi's was male. Most of the warm-blooded species on Everon were bisexual and mammalian—an unusual and fortunate parallel to Earth life.
However, once he had become aware of the femaleness of de-
Winter's pet, Jef was a little sorry that he had noticed the fact of its sex. The small pair of breasts under the soft grey fur had not been readily apparent, low down on the front of the jimi's body. Now that he was aware of them, they seemed to make the creature more like a small, trapped human; and the whole business of keeping it on a leash became vaguely repulsive.
"Mr. Robini! Mr. Robini, come and join us!" It was Martin calling cheerfully from the couch. Yanked out of his anonymity, Jef walked over and someone produced a straight chair for him.
"You all know Mr. Robini... you don't?" Martin proceeded to introduce him to Yvis Suchi and the others standing or seated around. "We're talking about variforms of our Earth meat animals, Mr. Robini. Mr. Clare Starkke here is a wisent rancher—"
He nodded at a man in a brown half-robe, seated in an armchair, who at first glance looked as if he might be almost as tall as the Constable. His face was deeply tanned, heavy-boned and beginning to show wrinkles, although his hair was still full and dark brown.
"Honored, sir," said Jef to Starkke.
"Honored to meet you, sir," responded Starkke in a somewhat brassy voice. "We're talking about all the troubles we have here, fighting this world so that we and our beefs can survive."
"Oh," said Jef.
He assumed that what Starkke had just said was a standard complaint of colonists. Variforms of Earth animals or plants were never introduced to a newly settled world without an exhausting preliminary round of tests and studies by the Ecological Corps. The variforms that were finally introduced had always been genetically tailored to the biological patterns on the world for which they were intended, and to that world alone. In nearly fifty-seven years since the techniques of variforming had been perfected, there had never been a case of a permitted species threatening the native ecology to which it was assigned. Of course, the variforms still represented an intrusion in the native ecology and their complete integration with it could take some generations of them.
Starkke's wisent would be genetically derived from the European bison, which went under that name. It struck Jef as interesting that it had been from the European, not the American, bison that the Everon variform had been genetically engineered; because the wisent had been a forest dweller, unlike the plains-dwelling buffalo, and on Everon it was the high grasslands below the forest areas to which the wisent herds were restricted. The forest areas, he had read, were restricted to game ranching of other variforms, chief among them being a variform eland.
Jef suddenly became conscious that they were all waiting for him to say something. He felt awkward sitting perched on his chair with his glass in hand. He looked around for some place where he could put it down, saw no surface nearby and bent over to set the glass on the floor by his chair.
"No doubt—" he began.
Yvis Suchi's jimi picked up his glass and apologetically, gently, handed it back to him.
"Leave him alone!" said Suchi sharply to the Everon animal. "We're not at home!"
She looked at Jef.
"I don't like things left on my floor," she said. "I see," said Jef.
"You're the one with the maolot, aren't you?"
Her tone was not friendly; and the temperature of the atmosphere of the group around him seem to lower ten degrees.
"Indeed he is!" said Martin energetically and cheerfully. "With the most remarkable subject of a highly important research undertaken back on Earth for the benefit of you good people. Mr. Robini's to be commended for the years he's put into it already, and the task he's undertaken to come out here and pursue it further."
The temperature rose perceptibly.
"You people back on Earth don't know what it's like, sir!" Starkke said to Jef. "Packs of these maolots. They kill just for the sake of killing. I've seen the sun come up and two hundred beefs, eh, lying dead. Or a pack of them'll stampede a whole herd and run them until they drop and die!"
The big rancher's voice was thick with anger, intensifying a tendency Jef had been hearing without really noticing it, ever since his landing—a sort of small, rhythmic halting in the local speech. He had never paid much attention to the stated fact that Basic One, the common commercial and technological language of Earth and the newly planted worlds nowadays, was said to be changing rapidly on many of those new worlds. Now it registered on him that all of those around him, except Martin, had some variation of that same rhythmic halt in their speech—ranging from hardly noticeable in the case of Armage to highly apparent in the case of this rancher.
"The nature of the beasts, no doubt," put in Martin pacifically.
"Their nature?" Starkke turned on him. "The nature of everything that runs, flies or swims on this planet! It's a fight for survival every day, here."
"Now then, it's a pretty, comfortable-seeming planet," said Martin. "It can't be all that bad."
Murmurs of disagreement came from all around him.
"Sir, it is that bad!" said Starkke. "Bad? It's worse! We fight this world for everything we get from it. You clear land and before you turn around there's new growth of grass over everything. Your animals eat it and it turns out to poison them. You plow— and you've barely put your plow away before there's a plague of insects that fly in, light, and burrow into the soil. Before you're ready to plant, the field is sprouting with all sorts of tough, useless growth; and it turns out the tracheae of the insects in the swarm were filled with seeds from somewhere else, and your ground is now a tangle of roots your plow won't cut through. Dam a river and before the dam is done, there's a cloudburst, a flood, and everything you've built gets washed away. You saw that hailstorm we had here just this afternoon?"
"Yes," said Martin.
"That hailstorm, sir, came along just in time to flatten a few hundred acres of spring grain that would have been ready for cutting in a week. If it'd done it on purpose, it couldn't have timed the destruction better. None of you Earth-siders have any idea what it's like being a planter on a new world like this!"
"But there're great rewards, are there not?" said Martin. "For example, when your cleared land ends up as downtown blocks in a city such as this, with correspondingly increased value to your credit account?"
"Some of us pile up credit, yes—" began Starkke.
"Everyone in this room—or am I wrong?" Martin said.
"Of course. No. You're not wrong," said Starkke. "The point is —the point is, though, sir—"
"Sit!" said Yvis Suchi sharply, twitching her jimi back on to his haunches. The Everon creature had half-risen to peer at the female jimi across the room. "All right, then, take my glass and get it filled again!"
She unsnapped the leash. The jimi took her glass in both front paws, lifted itself up on its hind legs and walked crouchingly across the room to the table where Tibur presided. There it circled around to Tibur's side of the table and sniffed at all the open bottles. Selecting a couple of them it proceeded to mix a drink and bring it back to Su
chi. The group around Martin had stopped talking to watch.
"Very good!" said Suchi, reconnecting the leash as the jimi brought the drink back to her. She turned to the other humans. "Actually, it's not that good a drink. But you've got to praise them after they've done something, or they'll simply sit there and shake the next time you give them an order."
"There was some thought of using them in factory-type work, assembling parts," a male member of the group said to Martin. "But it didn't work out."
"No, no. Of course not," Suchi said. "They can't understand the concept of work. It's all play to them..."
She continued with a description of the limitations of the jimis in practice; but Jef found his attention distracted. Through the doorway of the room he had just caught sight of someone he had not seen before, a younger man with black hair receding from a high forehead and carrying something like a small attaché case. He stood talking to Armage in the hall outside the lounge for a second, then turned and stepped on the ramp leading to the second story of Armage's home. As his weight came upon it, the ramp surface began to move, carrying the newcomer up, out of sight. Armage turned and went away down the hall in the direction of the dining room's other entrance.
Jef frowned for a second, feeling uneasy for some reason that would not quite identify itself to him. Then suddenly his mind put the second story of the building and the attaché case together.
He went swiftly to the ramp; but the new man had already reached the top and disappeared. Jef ran up the ramp after him, not waiting for its automatic machinery to transport him at its leisurely pace. The upper hall was also empty; but Jef turned directly to the door of the room that had been assigned to him, punched its latch button and stepped through as it rolled aside.
Inside was Mikey, his head lifted questioningly from the patch of sunlit carpet where he lay; and less than three meters from him, the thin man was opening his attaché case.