“Shush now,” said Bradebus, and took his hand away.
“Proctor,” said Lumi as the huge shape became recogniseable.
“Oh yes, lots of them here. Lots of them.”
There was something strange in his voice. Lumi watched Bradebus in confusion as the old man turned away and headed back towards the camp. Then the scientist glanced back at the light as it faded, before following the old man in. Had Bradebus come out here because he had heard a Proctor? Or had there been a more sinister reason? Lumi shivered in the night.
The next day of travel was marked only by the advent of their seeing a Proctor striding through the woodland far to one side. Otherwise it was exhausting and uneventful. Lumi quickly ate the food prepared for him and drank his tea before crawling into his tent and the comfort of his sleeping bag. In the dark before dawn they set out into more rugged country where deciduous trees gave way to conifers and patches of stone revealed sky above and a glimpse of distant mountains. There was a track of sorts that Bradebus led them from without a word of explanation. Lumi felt too tired to question, or to reassure Brown, but did have the energy to follow when Brown hurried to catch up with the tracker and demand an explanation.
“You’ll see,” said Bradebus, and hurried them on. Soon he brought them to the edge of the pines and a flat area of stone. Beyond the stone was nothing but purpled by distance mountains and sky. He waved them forward and walked to the edge. Lumi stood at his shoulder and looked down into the forest a thousand metres below. It was an awesome sight. Bradebus pointed.
“There,” he said.
There it was, lying on the shores of a lake, a silver cylinder amongst trees that only reached up to half its diameter.
“One would think a vantage point like this would be watched,” said Brown, glancing around.
“It is,” said Bradebus. “Cromwell’s people have been watching us for some time now.” He turned to Brown. “I said we would come as no surprise to him.”
Brown snorted in annoyance and walked away.
“How many people does Cromwell have with him would you say?” asked Lumi.
“Ten came with him, including the one from the ship — she has strange shoes — and about here I would reckon another ten.”
“We will have to be very careful then.”
“They won’t be as well armed, nor very well trained.”
They came across the first of them an hour later.
Keela squatted down in front of the woman and handed her a bowl of soup. It was accepted graciously and the woman sipped at it while Keela tested the chain attaching her to the tree.
“He’ll torture you,” said Keela.
“Yes, I imagine he will.”
“Why don’t you just let him in? If there are no weapons as you say… ”
“I am not amenable to coercion.”
“I don’t understand,” said Keela, settling down on the pine needles. “Why are you here?” The woman looked up from her soup and observed Keela with disconcerting eyes. “It is strange, is it not, that you ask me this now?”
“Well?”
“I am an ambassador from the human federation. I have come here to seek the wisdom if not the assistance of the Owner.”
“Why?”
“He is ten thousand years old. From who else would I seek wisdom?”
“He doesn’t exist,” said Keela.
The woman smiled and continued to sip her soup. Chagrined, Keela rose to her feet and stomped away.
“Anything?” Cromwell asked her.
“She just doesn’t make sense.”
“Then we’ll have to force her to make sense.”
Cromwell gazed speculatively at the glowing point of his cigarette.
They heard the crack of the shot simultaneous with the smack of the bullet against flesh. A constable staggered to one side, fell from the narrow path, and tumbled down the heather-tufted slope. Lumi had a glimpse of jetting blood, a raw exposure of flesh the size of a cooking apple.
“Down!” came the belated cry. Constables ran for cover behind the boulders at the base of the cliff as another shot range out and smashed splinters from rock. Lumi found himself behind a boulder with Bradebus and watched him take aim with his hunting carbine. He looked into the woodland below and could see nothing. The carbine went off with a satisfying explosion.
“Got the bugger.”
Immediately Bradebus was up and running down the slope. It all happened too quickly for Lumi. He followed after with the dazed constables and swearing Brown.
The man lay dead behind a splintered pine tree. Bradebus had shot him through the tree. The mangled bullet and wood splinters had made quite a mess. Lumi looked at the tracker questioningly. The man held out a handful of bullets. Lumi picked one up and inspected it: pointed steel tip, large caseless charge, enough to shoot a man through a tree, but of no use otherwise. There were no animals large enough to justify such bullets. How was it that they had come into this lowly tracker’s possession?
“Spread out now, and move with caution. Lambert, you stay back,” said Brown. Lambert was the one who carried the missile launcher. Before they moved off Brown went to confirm the fallen man was dead. Lumi went with him. Half his head was gone, somewhere on the slope above. They moved cautiously. Shots soon rang out again. The sound of bullets cracking through tree branches. A curtailed scream. Lumi saw the tracker running, his knife drawn and bloody. He was grinning. He looked like he was having fun. Two constables stayed back after that exchange, one to tend to the leg wound of the other. Nearby lay the corpses of two anonymous men and a woman, their blood draining into the pine needles. The second exchange was more intense, then abruptly ceased when Cromwell’s people withdrew.
“What the fuck!” said Brown.
Lumi saw he was looking to one side. Two Proctors were striding through the trees towards the ship. There was another out to the other side of them.
“How many, I wonder?” said Bradebus in a whimsical voice.
This is very important, thought Lumi. As far as he knew the Proctors only enforced those few of the Owner’s laws. There were two thousand of them, one for every million human beings on this, the Owner’s world. Seeing them together was an event rare enough to be recorded. The last time Proctors had been seen together had been forty-three years before, just two of them, and the observer of this rare occurrence had said they seemed almost embarrassed about the matter and had quickly parted. Three Proctors here, in this small area of trees, how many more were there in the vicinity?
The ship and the lake became visible through the trees. Brown scanned the area through compact binoculars.
“They’re dug in around the ship behind log barricades. The camp is clear. Can’t tell how many of them there are. There’s a woman chained to a tree between us and them.” He scanned to one side, then with his expression dumb-founded he handed the binoculars to Lumi and pointed. Lumi brought the lenses to his eyes.
Proctors.
They were on the lake shore, moving through the trees. As he watched, one walked up out of the water of the lake as if it had just walked across the bottom, which might well have been the case. What were they here for? They seemed to be doing little more than waiting and watching; leaning on their staffs and gazing into the distance like old-Earth Masai. The parallel was perhaps not the best. Are we their cattle?
Lumi wondered. Just then Cromwell’s people opened fire and Brown slammed him down to eat pine needles. The constables fired back with their automatic weapons until Brown yelled at them to stop.
“The woman! You’ll hit the woman!”