"This heirloom. It was worth a lot?"
"Priceless, really. Mother was always going on about it, that if only she'd gotten it like she was supposed to, she could have been the lady she was destined to be. Not like she isn't well off anyway, but that's my dear old ma, never satisfied."
"Hm. Interesting. 'Scuse me, I have to go to the bathroom." Rue sailed away, not too quickly she hoped and when she was safely inside the shuttle's tiny bathroom, she strapped herself onto the toilet and started to shake.
Then she got up and went to her own stateroom and dug through her pack. There it was, the little brown-black disk with its embossed galaxy-shape. The delicate little Ediacaran, who really had journeyed through a billion years of adventure to nestle now in her hand.
Rue began to laugh. Oh no, it would not do to tell Max that this whole trip had been unnecessary, that she had been rich all along and not known it. Still, she looped the heirloom around her neck and let it nestle out of sight inside her blouse. Then she wiped her eyes, coughed past the lump in her throat and flew back to Max's room. She had to tell him that, fearful though he might be, they could not hide here, but tomorrow would announce themselves to whatever waited at Jentry's Envy.
PART TWO
Household Gods
7
MICHAEL BEQUITH SORTED through a cloud of public inscape windows his employer had left open and floating over his bed. Usually Michael's eyes and hands were on his task— everything he did was done with meticulous perfection. Today, his hands went about their task, closing, nesting, and arranging insubstantial windows with the usual precision. His mind was elsewhere.
Dr. Herat's room was bigger than Michael's, but that was not saying much. Laurent Herat, Ph.D., had inhabited a metal cell four by five meters in dimension for the last three months. Michael's room was three by four. There was no decoration in these living quarters, beyond a failed attempt at wood panelling on some of the walls. The lights were harsh, the air recycled and flat and there were no physical windows because they were twenty meters underground.
Twice a day the walls shook with the force of a tidal bore thundering overhead. Dr. Herat was always in the control room during the tides, so Michael had taken that as the best time to tidy up after the professor. The rest of the day was his own, for there was precious little he could do for Herat in a research station as minimalistic as this one. He struggled with the vagaries of interstellar e-mail, trying to keep up with the academic debates raging back home, but his summaries for Herat were meager these days. They both knew where the discussion was going to leave them, anyway.
He finished arranging the windows and looked around for any other untidiness. Dr. Herat always left a half-glass of wine on the bedside table from last night. It was his habit to sip that while reading his mail and jotting notes on the day's research. Today the glass was there, but it was still full.
That was odd. Dr. Herat was in a glum mood lately; Michael had read the exobiologist's last report and knew it was doomed to explode like a bombshell back home. It was, in fact, an attack on the whole endeavor that had sent Herat and his research assistant to this and dozens of other worlds. It called into question the grant expenditures of a hundred top scientists. The first casualty of the grant application process was truth; Herat was going to be pilloried and he knew it.
Maybe he was just tired. Dr. Herat wasn't as young as he'd been when Michael first sought out his patronage. (Neither was Michael, but that sort of consideration never entered his mind.) Herat usually worked fourteen-hour days and slept only five hours. He had been operating on this schedule, machinelike, for ten years now. Small wonder that he should finally start nodding off before reading his mail.
Michael took the wine and dumped it in the metal sink. Then he took one last look around and left the room.
On other worlds he would have had a full day ahead of him. There was much organization to be done, sometimes behind Dr. Herat's back. Michael knew the supply clerks on thirty stations and understood the vices and habits of a dozen starship pursers. He could usually anticipate Herat's need for equipment or supplies and more than once he'd acquired pieces of equipment from half-legal sources that no amount of pleading with the Panspermia Institute had been able to produce. Dr. Herat proclaimed Michael's talents uncanny, but it was merely that he spent all his time learning the human side of bureaucracy and working it to their advantage.
Kadesh was not their usual research destination. Herat had a great reputation and several times in the past had been called in to examine priceless relics of ancient extinct civilizations. On those occasions the skies of the «dig» planet had swarmed with ships— news media, other researchers, guard ships, the yachts of the rich. There were no ruins on Kadesh; there was no swarm of ships, only the supply ship in orbit and this lone station buried under the tidal flats of a northern continent.
The tides were such that Michael couldn't even go out for a walk if he wanted to.
By his watch it was about fifteen minutes until the next bore. He stood in the narrow hallway for a bit, debating where to go. Finally boredom drove him back to his own room.
He sat on the bed and studied the walls. It was good to be leaving this place, even if they didn't know where they would go next. It might be time for Herat to resume his long-neglected teaching practise on Noctis Regina. Certainly Herat needed to do some hard thinking about his future. For the first time in five years, Michael knew he needed to do the same.
A chime sounded in his mind: an inscape call. "Dr. Bequith! Please call up."
He stood, relieved that he was wanted. "Bequith here," he said.
"Get your ass up here now, man, your boss is still out on the flats and the bore's coming in!"
For a second he just stared at the bed; then Michael was out the door and running.
The station was shaped like a can, buried on end. He raced up the zigzagging stairs from the living quarters, through the exercise level and the galley level and to the control room in record time. The research associates were crowding around a screen there, babbling and pointing.
"Where is he?" Michael demanded of Hart, a young and insolent RA who usually haunted the control room because nobody tolerated him anywhere else. Hart's face was twisted in a sneer.
"He's wading," said Hart. "Won't come back in. Says he wants to watch the bore."
"We've all done it," said Meline, a planetologist Herat had worked with before. "But you don't go down to the shoreline! You stand at the top of the ladder. That way you can slam the hatch before it gets too close." Her voice slightly emphasized the word it.
"All right," said Michael. "I'll fetch him in." He clattered up the next flight of steps, to the suit room. It took two precious minutes to get into his quarantine suit, then another to walk through the scouring jets that removed all trace of Earthly microbial life from the suit's surface. He paced clumsily to the airlock and when it finally released him into the bottom of the ladder well he wondered if he was too late. The bore would arrive any minute now.
He pulled himself out of the well into Kadesh's sunshine.
Kadesh's one moon was much bigger and closer to the planet than Earth's Luna. The tides here were orders of magnitude higher; there were few coastal areas that had not been pounded into gentle inclines by millions of years' worth of tsunamis. Here at the shoreline of the largest continent, Michael could have waded two kilometers out to sea before the water came above his waist. The flat vista was deceptively calm, the air blue with towering pillow clouds.
Any second now a wall of water three hundred meters high would come racing over the horizon, carrying with it a froth of boulders as big as houses. Michael had seen it on video; it was over almost before your eye told you what it was.