Diane Duane - Storm at Eldala

Gabriel quickly scanned through the last several starfalls and starrises, and then started to read them with more care while the program was doing the same for the entire log. To Angela he said, "When they told me about this place you were going. I got curious. I'd never heard of it before. What caused your interest in it?"

"Well, it was a blank in the gazetteer," Angela said. "There had been some kind of accident when the original survey came through. Said they were having mechanical trouble. Anyway, they reported the planet as too cold and went on to their next stop." "Too cold?"

"Bad ambient temperature," said Angela. "Eight C below zero, apparently." Gabriel nodded. That would have been reason enough to pass on when there were hopes of finding something better in the next system along. Eight was a very low ambient, if he remembered the planetary climatic information he'd been taught as a marine. It suggested that even summer highs might not be much better than twelve C, which was bad for crops, even those that had been genetically tailored for chilly conditions. There was little point in settling a planet that was both far away and where food could not be successfully grown. You wound up having to bring everything in, and if there was no other resource there to make the trip worthwhile, no stellar nation or company would bother investigating settlement any further.

He paused, looking at something the diagnostic program had flagged. "Let me look at that," he told the computer. "So you gave up on it?" Gabriel asked Angela.

She shrugged and said, "It wasn't what we had in mind. We got tired of being far away from everything.. starfall after starfall, never seeing anyone, watching the same old entertainment over and over on the ship's channels. ."

"You have Grawl to make poetry for you," Gabriel said with an absolutely straight face. Angela punched him in the shoulder, more fiercely than Gabriel had braced himself to withstand. He rocked and barely kept from falling over sideways. "Don't mock her," Angela said. "She's had a hard time."

"She looks like she's survived it," Gabriel said, touching the panel again to focus the diagnostic's attention on what he thought he had found.

Angela folded her arms and stared down at the toes of her boots. "Survival isn't joy," she said. Gabriel paused, glancing at her. "I wouldn't know a lot about what constitutes joy for a weren." Angela gave him a resigned look. "How clear can any of us be about what goes on in an alien's mind? Any more than any of them can be clear about what we're thinking? I just worry about her, that's all. I think she'd really rather be home on Kurg, getting involved in tribal politics and ripping out the occasional suitor's throat, but she's made the best she can out of her life." She scratched at a worn place on the decking. "It must have been awful," Angela said softly, "always being beaten up and sat on, having the food stolen out from under your nose and everything else worthwhile being taken away from you by the stronger ones, the faster ones. Grawl found another way."

Angela looked up again and said, "But is she happy?" A touch of familiarity there? Gabriel thought. "And you," he said, "you got beaten up and sat on as well?"

She gave him a look both indignant and amused. "Ah, an amateur thought-wrangler," she said. "For your information, I was one of two and bigger than my brother. As a matter of fact I beat him up whenever he needed it, which was most of the time. Brothers are always getting out of hand. If you don't show them the error of their ways early on, they run around making messes forever after."

Gabriel smiled at that. "I'll take your word for it. Meanwhile, look at this." He pointed at the log display in the glass and at the diagnostic program's suggestion of what should be present there. "I'm no expert, but this might be the trouble. I know our drive has routines to keep this from happening. Yours is enough like ours to suggest this is the problem. I think the synch between the two atomic clocks that handle the drive has been failing. See." He pointed. "The logs show them having gotten progressively more out of synch over the past few weeks. This one in particular, the gravity induction apparatus, looks like its clock has been speeding up. Not by huge amounts, but enough for it to start interfering now. Has this started acting strangely over the last couple of starfalls?"

Angela nodded. "Just after we left Mantebron." Gabriel stared at the diagnostics showing in the panel. "All right. I'm going to try to reset it. You willing to have me do that?" "Yes. I don't see that it can do that much harm."

I hope you're right, Gabriel thought. He backed up through the diagnostic program again and went down the tree to where the clock routines were. Touching a spot labeled Synchrony, he was rewarded by a message that asked, Reset clocks to match? " Aha," he said. "That they have this particular routine makes it sound like this problem might come up more than infrequently." Gabriel looked sideways at her. "Have you missed a scheduled service, by any chance?"

"Uh. ." She looked embarrassed. "Possibly."

"This may be one of the things they do on those routine services," Gabriel said, and touched the fork of the choice-tree that said YES. DONE, it said a second later.

"All right," he said. "When we're off the ship, punch it and see what happens. We won't leave until we see you safely away. If you can't get out, you and Grawl come aboard Sunshine with us, and we'll get you to Aegis so you can arrange a return-and-tow with somebody there."

"Seems fair enough," Angela said as she went out. Gabriel closed down the panel routines and went after her.

As they were walking back to the lift, Angela looked at him curiously. "Something leak in your pocket?" "Huh? Oh." Gabriel glanced down at the pocket where the luckstone had been. "No, just a burn. I got careless with some equipment."

"Must have been some equipment. I thought those things were burn-proof."

"So did I," Gabriel said, thinking morosely of that spot on the decking. "Another of life's little surprises." In the lift, Angela leaned against its wall, looking thoughtful. She glanced up at him then, and Gabriel thought, Oh, please, don't invite me to dinner; I just want to get out of here and get on with what we were doing.

"Eldala," Angela said. "Are you interested in it?" Gabriel blinked. "Uh. . why?"

"You mentioned it first. Plainly it must have stuck in your mind when you heard about it."

"Well," Gabriel said, "yes." He shrugged. "It hardly matters, though. You've got the exploration contract."

"I'll sell it to you," Angela said.

Gabriel stared at her as the lift door opened.

"Why?"

"It's no good to me now," said Angela. "If you're right about the drive clocks, I'll be glad, but I'm not going anywhere again without having this drive serviced. That may take me a while. By then. ." She shrugged.

By then you may have found something more interesting to do with your money, Gabriel thought. Hmf. She looked at him as they walked back into the control room. "Are you interested?" Gabriel looked over at Enda, who was seated next to Grawl. Enda, looking from him to Angela to him again, gave Gabriel a look that said, Should I ask?

"Angela's interested in selling the exploration contract for Eldala," Gabriel said.

At this, Grawl screwed her face down into what looked like a frown. Enda looked more than usually thoughtful. "The price?"

"Is negotiable, believe me," Angela said. "I just don't feel prepared to carry on with that contract at this point."

"You were there, I take it?" said Enda.

Angela nodded and Enda continued, "Not for long, though. Is the world habitable for humans?" "Not without a lot of support, I think," Angela said. "Low ambient, supposedly," said Gabriel.