Ozzie Munson and Cobber Alhinwa emerged from the shelter where they had just stored their gear and paused to see what Sallah was staring at.
“Oh, my word, he’s at it again,” Ozzie said, grinning maliciously at Sallah.
“He’ll crash hisself,” Cobber added, shaking his head, “and that bleeding lake’s so deep we’d never find ’im. Or the sled. And we need that.”
Seeing Svenda Olubushtu coming to join them, Sallah hastily turned and headed for the main shelter of the small prospecting camp. She did not care to listen to Svenda’s snide, jealous remarks. It was not as if Sallah encouraged Drake Bonneau. On the contrary, she had emphatically, publicly, and frequently made her disinterest plain enough.
Maybe I’m going about discouraging him the wrong way, she thought. Maybe if I’d run after him, hang on his every word, and ambush him every chance I get, the way Svenda’s doing, he’d leave me alone, too.
In the main shelter, she found Tarvi Andiyar already marking the day’s findings on the big screen, muttering to himself as he did so, his spidery fingers flicking at the terminal keys so fast that even the word processor had trouble keeping up with him. No one understood him when he talked to himself like that; he was speaking in his first language, an obscure Indic dialect. When asked about his eccentricity, he would respond with one of his heart-melting smiles.
“For other ears to hear this beautiful liquid language, so it will be spoken even here on Pern, so that there will be one person alive who still speaks it fluently, even after all these centuries,” he always told those who asked. “Is it not a lovely language, lilting, melodic, a joy to the ear?”
An intuitive, highly trained mining engineer, Tarvi had a reputation of being able to trace elusive veins through many subterranean shifts and faults. He had joined the Pern expedition because all the glorious hidden “blood and tears of Mother Earth,” as he chose to describe the products of mining, had been pried from her bosom. He had prospected on First, too, but the alien metals had eluded his perceptions and so he had traveled across a galaxy to ply his trade in what he called his “declining years.”
As Tarvi Andiyar had only reached his sixth decade, that remark generally brought the reassurances he required from the kindly, or hoots of derision from those who knew his ploys. Sallah liked him for his wry and subtle wit, which he generally turned on his own shortcomings, and would never think to use to offend anyone else.
Since Sallah had first encountered him after coldsleep, he had not put even so much as an ounce more on his long, almost emaciated frame. “My family has had generations of gurus and mahatmas, all intent on fasting for the purification of their souls and bowels, until it has become a genetic imperative for all Andiyars to be of the thinness of a lathe. But I am strong. I do not need bulk and thews and bulging muscles. I am every bit as strong as the strongest sumo wrestler.” Everyone who had seen him work all day without respite beside Ozzie and Cobber knew that his claim was no idle boast.
Sallah found herself more attracted to the lanky engineer than to any of the other men in the colony. But if she could not impress on Drake Bonneau how little she cared for him, she was equally unable to get closer to Tarvi.
“What’s the tally, Tarvi?” she asked, nodding to Valli Lieb, who was already relaxing with a quikal drink.
One of the first things human settlers seemed to do on any new world was to make an immediate and intensive search for fermentables, and to devise an alcoholic beverage in the quickest possible time. Every lab at Landing, no matter what its basic function, had experimented with distilling or fermenting local fruits into potable beverages. The quikal still had been the first piece of equipment assembled when the mining expedition had set up its base camp, and no one had objected when Cobber and Ozzie had spent the first day producing imbibables from the fermented juices they had brought along. Svenda had berated them fiercely, while Tarvi and Sallah had merely carried on with the surveying. That first evening in the camp the drink had been more than a tradition: it was an achievement.
As Svenda entered the shelter, Sallah poured herself a glass of quikal. Valli moved over on the bench to make room for her. Valli looked freshly washed and in far better shape than when she had emerged from the brush that afternoon, covered with slime but bearing some very interesting samples for assay.
At that moment they heard the sound of the sled landing outside the shelter. Svenda craned her neck to watch Drake’s progress up from the pad; she barely moved as Ozzie and Cobber brushed past her to enter the room.
“What was the assay, Valli?” Sallah asked.
“Promising, promising,” the geologist said, her face glowing with achievement. “Bauxite has so many uses! This strike alone makes this expedition profitable.”
“However, your find—” Cobber bowed formally to Valli. “—will be far easier to work in an open pit.”
“Ha! We have enough to mine both,” Ozzie said. “High-grade ore’s always needed.”
“And,” Tarvi put in, joining them at the table though he refused the drink Svenda always offered him, “there is copper and tin enough within reasonable distance so that a mining town could profitably be established by this beautiful lake, with hydroelectric from the falls to power refineries, and a good waterway to transport the finished products to the coast, and thence to Landing.”
“So,” Svenda asked, “this site is viable?” She looked about her with an air of possession that struck Sallah as slightly premature. Charterers had first choice, before contract specialists.
“I shall certainly recommend it,” Tarvi said, smiling in the avuncular way he had that always annoyed Sallah. He was not old. He was very attractive, but if he kept thinking of himself as everyone’s uncle, how could she get him to really look at her? “I have recommended it,” he went on. “Especially as that slime into which you fell today, Valli, is high-yield mineral oil.” When the cheers had subsided, he shook his head. “Metals, yes. Petroleum, no. You all know that. To establish this as an effective colony, we must learn how to function efficiently at a lower technological level. That’s where the skill comes in, and how skills are remembered.”
“Not everyone agrees with our leaders on that score,” Svenda said, scowling.
“We signed the charter and we all agreed to honor it,” Valli said, quickly glancing at the others to see if anyone else concurred with Svenda.
“Fools,” was the blond girl’s derisive rejoinder. Slopping more quikal into her beaker, Svenda left the shelter.
Tarvi looked after her, his mobile face anxious.
“She’s all wind and piss,” Sallah said softly to him.
He raised his eyebrows, his dark eyes regarding her expressionlessly for a moment. Then his usual smile reappeared, and he patted her shoulder—unfortunately just as one would pat an obedient child. “Ah, and here is Drake with our supplies and news of our comrades.”
“Hey, where is everyone?” Drake demanded the moment he entered, well laden with bundles. “There’s more in the sled, too.”
Sallah dropped her head to hide her expression. “We’re celebrating, Drake,” Valli said, taking him a glass of quikal. “Two new finds, both of them rich and easily worked. We’re in business.”