"I still say—"
"No, you don't say," Aaron said. "Sit." There was ice in his voice.
Carey Lou sat.
"Thank you. Mr. Chairman—Uncle Zack—everyone here regrets what happened, and it is utterly pointless to portion out blame. Yes, we tried to mount an expedition to the mainland. We made a lot of mistakes, but we didn't kill anyone—"
"You just shut up!" Mary Ann shouted.
Cadmann shook his head. "Let him finish," he said softly.
"But—"
Cadmann took her hand. "He can't hurt us. Let him talk."
"We didn't kill anyone, but Toshiro wouldn't have died if we hadn't acted as we did," Aaron was saying. "I think the commission has acted very wisely. ‘Death by misadventure,' they said, and death by misadventure it was. The important thing is there shouldn't be any more misadventures!
"We still have to go back to the mainland. It's more important than ever," Aaron said. "You all know that Tau Ceti's flaring up. Another Avalon Surprise, and already we've seen changes. Eels. Weather. Edgar says there'll be more—" He glanced down the table, waited for Edgar's nod. "You've got more on that, Edgar? Good."
"Mr. Chairman," Julia Hortha said.
"Please," Aaron said. "I'd like to finish."
"You have the floor," Zack said.
"It's doubly important to understand what happened to Joe and Linda now," Aaron said. "We need the supplies from the mines, and it will take years to find and develop new mine sites as good as the ones we had." He had been speaking directly to Zack, but now he turned to include everyone in the room. "We're all concerned because there aren't enough raw materials. If we don't get a new supply we'll be making hard choices soon enough! And in case anyone doesn't know, there are no suitable mine sites on Camelot Island, and the only mainland sites anywhere near as good as Deadwood Pass are far in the interior or down at levels where grendels live. Deadwood has both organics and metals. It will take years to bring a new site up to the production we had from Deadwood Pass."
"But Deadwood's a wreck!"
Aaron didn't look to see who had spoken. "Yes, but not a hopeless wreck. There's a lot of machinery there. We could have it back up to production in a few months."
"How do you know that?" Hendrick Sills asked.
"Edgar Sikes helped me direct Cassandra to do a study," Aaron said.
"Edgar?"
Edgar Sikes stood, "The minebit mommy isn't that badly damaged. It's not at the tunnel nexus, it's backed off into a side corridor. The programming might have got shook up, but Cassie's got a duplicate on file, and that's unharmed. I looked. Ask for Operation Restore Deadwood. It's all there, at least in preliminary—"
"I've looked at much of it," Zack said from the podium. "I think he's right about that. I'm not sure I share his conclusions, but even if we picked another mining site, we'd have to move that entire minebit factory—"
Katya leaned close to Justin. "He's got it all worked out, hasn't he?"
"Pretty much," Justin said.
"Which makes it more important than ever to understand what happened at Deadwood Pass," Aaron said. "But we will never understand that in isolation. Whatever killed Joe and Linda doesn't live up there. We won't know what it is until we understand far more of Avalon's ecology than we know." He turned to face Big Chaka, who sat with his son down among the First. "Sir, don't you agree?"
Big Chaka stood. Standing, his eyes were at a level with Little Chaka's. "I do agree." He and Little Chaka nodded in unison.
"Everyone in this room regrets what happened to Toshiro," Aaron said. "Death by misadventure. The misadventure was this senseless distrust between First and Second, Earth Born and Star Born. If Toshiro's death has any meaning at all, it's to serve as the end of that! Mr. Chairman, I move that volunteers go back to the mainland, to reclaim the mines and more, to claim what is our own. Let us honor Toshiro's memory by completing the work we should all be doing together. I so move."
There was a moment of silence; then Big Chaka said, carefully and distinctly, "Second."
Trish relaxed, stretching unobtrusively, merely listening. Toshiro had taught her more about relaxation than she would ever have learned on her own. She was going to miss him terribly.
The vote was going Aaron's way. They'd be returning to the mainland with the blessings of the First... with obvious exceptions. Aaron himself looked relaxed, almost sleepy. What in hell did he have in mind? It was only for her own amusement that Trish had accused the First of murder. Then Aaron had reached behind Jessica's bent head and taken her by the wrist and, irresistibly, pulled her close enough to speak directly into her ear.
"Trish dear, I've got everything I want here. If you throw it away for me I'll kill you." And he smiled reassuringly and let go, let her settle back in her seat.
He means that. What does he think he has? Trish watched Edgar watching Aaron. They'd known each other since childhood, raised for some years by Joe Sikes, while Trish was bouncing from family to family... What was going through Edgar's head? Trish kicked a shoe off and reached under the table with agile toes. Edgar jumped, then grinned at her.
"... Weather," Zack said. "Aaron—Edgar—maybe you haven't seen what happened at Surf's Up? It looked like your movie hurricane turned real. Edgar, for twenty years Camelot got weather like California without the goddamned quakes and the rioters." Zack was pleading. "What's going on? I looked through your Fimbulchaos file—"
Aaron nodded at Edgar. Edgar stood up. He'd started to do that anyway, Trish noted, but the illusion would be that Edgar obeyed Aaron.
And Edgar let that notion stand. "Cassandra, give us Fimbulchaos." He didn't wait for the computer's response. "Citizens, for over a billion years, life on Earth has been studying the sun. Astronomers have six thousand years of records if you allow the Egyptians. Three hundred years ago, the sun had only been around for a few million years, because God hadn't invented fusion yet... "
Cassandra had two suns floating beneath the communal hall's high ceiling. As Edgar talked, the two shrank to stars; more stars blinked alongside.
"Two hundred and fifty years ago they found resonant shock-wave patterns in the sun. Sol is ringing like a great bell. About the same time, astrophysicists first detected a supernova by the neutrinos blasting from its core, so all the telescopes on Earth were pointed at the Large Magellanic Cloud before the light even reached Earth. It's two hundred and forty years since we sent our first probes over the poles of rotation of a star. The thing is, almost all of that study was of Sol. Sol! We had twenty, thirty years of close observation of other suns before Geographic left Sol. What we know about Tau Ceti is pitiful."
One bright star expanded to fill the dome. A wedge of the fiery globe disappeared, and a dissected star rotated for Edgar's audience.
There were little pockets of conversation all through the hall;
Cassandra was amplifying Edgar's voice above background noise. "Tau Ceti runs a fifty-year sunspot cycle, maybe. We've only seen about twenty years of that, so it's really just a guess. We can detect shock waves in Tau Ceti's interior. They're a lot like Sol's, but the cells are bigger, and the surface storms where the shock waves meet—Cassandra, my Fimbulchaos Sunspot Four—they're more violent than Sol's." Flame arced out from Tau Ceti, hundreds of thousands of miles before the stream bent back to kiss the surface. "They're getting more energetic as we near the peak of the sunspot cycle, but they don't reach as far out as Sol's would. Tau Ceti's got more powerful magnetic fields.