Diane Duane - Storm at Eldala

She came down the hall with the plant pot. "Good. Meanwhile, a little natural sunlight can do this no harm."

"You know what I think?" Gabriel said. "I think that thing's made of some kind of plastic. It's a joke on a poor human who doesn't know any better."

Enda smiled. "When I play a joke on you, it will be a better one than that. When you are ready, let us go into town and see about those vegetables and anything else we can discover."

They went out an hour or so later. By the time they finished their stops at the various shops and businesses in Sunbreak, lunch was starting when they finally got to the community center. Enda sat down with a glass of the bubbling water and started making notes on the morning's discussions. Gabriel had chai while he gazed out the windows at the extraordinary view, row after row of serried peaks in the now-fading afternoon light.

Rather to his pleasure, they didn't stay alone for long. A couple of people came along to sit and chat with them. "Just curious," said the lady, an Alaundrin, who sat down with a tall mug of some pungent kind of hotdraft that Gabriel couldn't identify.

"Nosey," said the man who sat down across from her, a short broad man with a big nose and merry little eyes.

The lady was Marielle Esephanne. Her husband was still in the office taking care of some paperwork in his job as a secretary to the Regency Expansion Bureau, the department that oversaw infrastructure matters in Sunbreak. The man introduced himself as Rov Melek, cousin to a homesteader growing beef lichen and broadleaf maleaster on a small terraced farm just across the valley from Sunbreak on Black Mountain.

"But they're all black around here," said Gabriel.

Rov winked at him as he turned around his own glass of chai, waiting for it to cool. "Makes it easier to name them."

Enda looked up from her notes. "You are responsible for the vegetables. Let me finish this, then I want to talk to you about those."

Rov grinned. "We're becoming a gourmet's paradise," he said to Gabriel. "People come, oh, tens of light-years for our food, but it would be nice if more of them came back more than once. We get so many of these one-time charlies."

Gabriel chatted with the two Sunbreakers while Enda finished her notes. As he had suspected, it turned out that most people in the settlement worked for either Alaundril or the Regency of Bluefall. There was not a lot else to do here. However, the settlers seemed to consider one administration about as good (or bad) as the other, and Gabriel heard Marielle or Rov refer to "the government" and mean both sides of the colonial divide.

Maybe, Gabriel thought, it's because this place is so small and isolated. Making a big deal over one side or the other wouldn't get you far. They're all stuck here together, a long way from anywhere else. They were eager enough to hear what news Gabriel had to pass on from Grith. Everyone in town knew about Rae Alwhirn's outburst of the previous evening, but no one knew what it was about or had connected recent events at Corrivale with them. Marielle and Rov listened without much comment to Gabriel's much-edited story of his visit to Rhynchus in company with Enda and Helm. "That guy," Rov said in reference to Helm, "looks like he might own a gun or so." Gabriel agreed. When he finished telling about their arrival at Grith and the standoff between a VoidCorp dreadnought, Falada, and a group of Concord cruisers, Marielle whistled softly. "There's why Rae got so upset. He's sure that VoidCorp's trying to shut him down."

Gabriel blinked. "But they were trying to shut us down. I'm not sure why he was angry at us for being on the wrong side of them. ."

"Rae's got more conspiracy theories than a riglia's got cilia," Rov said. "He's always been on a hair trigger, seeing something hiding behind every rock. He's had a lot of trouble in his business. Bad luck, mostly. A power failure a while back cost him a lot in insurance; there were lawsuits. . Now Rae thinks everything that happens around here is aimed at him." Rov scratched his head. "Have to admit, I haven't seen him pop like that before. He must think you're out to get him in particular because you're infotraders."

"Did he treat the I.I. people the same way?" Gabriel asked.

"Frikes, no, they were here six years before he started. They've been trading in and out of this system, to Aegis and Tendril all that while, but you see the problem." Rov gestured around him. "We're so small here, and so quiet. Our Grid's so small you could spit across it. A lot of people don't like the idea of them," he jerked a desultory thumb over his shoulder, "the riglia." Enda pushed her notepad aside. "Do you not like the idea of them either?"

"Don't see that they care about my opinion one way or the other," Rov said, "but they were here first. We didn't know when we came that they were more than dumb animals. A lot of us came a long way to settle here, got ourselves set up, and then what do we find?" He pulled his head down between his shoulders as if seeking protection from something. "Government shoulda checked things out more carefully before they let anyone settle here, before those fraal scientists came in and told everybody 'Guess what, you've got company.' " He sighed. "Sorry, lady. I know it wasn't your fault. Anyway, there are people leaving all the time. The feeling that you're being watched… it gets to you after a while." "I've felt that," Gabriel said. "An uneasy kind of feeling."

"That's right," Marielle said. "Well, it's the riglia, I suppose. They're mindwalkers, so they can do that. There are a lot more of them than there are of us." She sighed. "Some day maybe there'll be nobody but them here again, but meantime a lot of us have spent everything we had to come here. We can't just go. There's nothing to go with." Gabriel nodded and took a drink of his chai.

"This isn't a busy part of space, anyway," said Rov. "No other well-settled systems are nearby. There are some useless ones— stars but no planets, or planets that're just rocks, no point even in mining 'em. You hear stories, rumors about one world or another that got missed when they did the surveys, but you can't take things like that too seriously."

"They missed Rivendale that same way," said Enda, "when they first came through the system. No one thought so small a dwarf star would have a planet."

"Well, true enough, lady," Rov said. "It's rare, isn't it? Hasn't happened since, though you keep hearing stories and rumors. People go out looking for those places and don't come back." He dropped his voice lower. "And there are ships out there, too, that nobody knows where they come from — out in the empty spaces, the 'back of the Verge,' the Barrens. Nobody sensible goes out that way. Crazy explorers, they go, but you don't see them again. We had a couple through here," he said as he reached for the wine bottle, "had themselves an exploration contract from the CSS and everything. They were on their way to someplace out past Coulomb." Gabriel looked at Enda. "What's past Coulomb?" "Nothing that I know of".

"That's just my point," Rov said, "but they were going that way anyhow. Something called Elder? Caldera? Something. . No, Eldala, it was." Enda shook her head. "I have never heard of it."

"You're not alone. But off they went, she and her friend, and we haven't seen hide or hair of them since. Hair enough her friend had, too." Rov chuckled.

"Maybe," Gabriel said, wondering what Rov's last comment might have meant but deciding not to press it. "Were they just more of the one-time visitors you mentioned?"

"I wouldn't have thought so," said Rov, drinking the last of his drink and eyeing the glass absently. "The one lady, the human, she was real taken with this place. She said it reminded her of home. Wouldn't want to think what her home looked like, but she said she was definitely coming back." He shrugged. "Infinity only knows where she is now. And there've been others. A few went missing in transit to somewhere else — Aegis, Richards, Annahoy — and didn't turn up at the other end. They found one or two ships, but no sign of the pilots or passengers. That was weird." "Where were the ships found?" Enda said.