Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

“Well, I wouldn’t let that get you,” he told her. “What set me apart in that situation was experience, and in Father Chicanis’s case it was knowledge of what was there and a rifle to deal with it. You’ve been good once we got on solid ground, as good as anybody here.”

She smiled. “Thanks. I needed that, I think.”

“Surprised we haven’t run into any of the locals yet?”

“Not really. There aren’t that many for this whole region, and they are widely scattered in groups of perhaps twenty-five to fifty, no more. I’m revising my theories about what they will be like, though, when we do meet them. This corrosive effect, together with ample and well-distributed food, probably means that they are in fact more primitive, more tribal than I’d thought. I’d really like to find them and find out, although without any supplies I have a feeling getting accepted by them will be tough. Dealing with them might be tougher yet. Usually you can bribe your way to at least safe passage, but I’m not sure we’ll have as good a result now as I’d planned. Not unless Father Chicanis is willing to break up our last remaining artifacts.”

“I think he’ll die rather than give up the communion set,” Harker replied. “So—that’s why you’re along? Expert on dealing with primitives by using old established ways and means?”

“Something like that. And I get to be the first in my profession to actually interact with them. It’s a career maker. If, that is, we meet any of them, and if we manage to get off this rock somehow.”

“You think we’re stuck?”

She shrugged. “What’s the boat we left buried back there made of, and how buried does it have to be? Without the boat, how do we get back to the island? Swim forty-odd kilometers of ocean? I’m not sure I’m up to that. I think that poor man who did the Dutchman’s business was in the same fix. That’s why he broadcast.”

“Yeah, but there’s every evidence from the last part of that recording that something was stalking him,” Harker noted. “And since he was never heard from again, that something probably killed him. Who or what was it?”

“Titans? One of the tribes? Who knows? I think we may find out, that’s all.”

“I’m not so concerned about the long-term as the short-term killer,” he told her. “If they can get this lens weapon to work, they’ll eventually be able to land a ship right here and pick us up. If it doesn’t work, we’re back to square one anyway.”

They sat in silence for a while, and her gaze returned to the moon and stars above.

“Still looking for the grid?” he asked her. “In this moonlight, I doubt if it would show up much at all.”

“Oh, it’s there,” she assured him. “I can sense it somehow, more than see it. It plays over me, gets in my head somehow, makes anything but the here and now seem distant, unimportant.”

“I feel something, too, sometimes,” he admitted. “I think we all do, except Hamille, although who can know for sure about it?”

“Hamille isn’t human. This is designed for us, I think,” she responded, still staring at the stars. “I think it’s more than protection and monitoring. I think it messes with minds. Our minds.”

“What kind of effect does it have on you?” he asked, looking away abruptly as her comments fed a healthy paranoia.

“Interesting effects,” she responded enigmatically. “It stirs up parts of me I’d almost forgotten were there. Not strongly enough yet, but we’ll see.”

He got a vague idea she was talking about and around sexual matters, but he didn’t press it. He was still unaffected enough to consider the implications. If they really were exerting some kind of subtle mass stimulation or hypnosis or whatever, then…

Then maybe the Titans weren’t as oblivious to humans as had been assumed.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Kat Socolov said as they walked along under another hot sun.

“Sometimes a dangerous practice,” N’Gana responded.

They’d all pretty well cast off everything except a vine belt that had been twisted and looped and held their batons and other weapons and tools, and Father Chicanis had made a leaf and vine backpack for his cherished communion set. Oddly, the nudity didn’t seem to bother any of them, not even the priest, or particularly turn anyone on, either.

“If this mixture melts away our precious artificial substances,” asked Kat, “then it’s gonna melt away those password cubes as well, isn’t it?”

“I told you, they will be sufficiently below ground to have escaped this. We’ve seen areas under the old road-works here where things are remarkably well preserved if they’re kept out of that rain and the elements,” the colonel replied.

“Oh, sure—they might well be there, if nobody’s taken them, if they’re still where the incomplete records said they were, and so on. That’s not the point. The thing is, so we get there, we get down, we illuminate everything somehow, and Hamille, here, gets through the holes in the foundation and brings them back to us. Then what? The moment we bring them up here to the surface, they’re gonna be rained on. If we retrace our path, it’s another ten days to two weeks, even if we figure out how to get back to the island. By that time they’ll be mush and you know it. We’re stuck.”

N’Gana wasn’t at all bothered. “There is a contingency plan for everything,” he told her. “I have already determined a method to get around that.”

“Yeah? What?” Harker put in, curious himself.

“First things first. If we don’t have it, the rest is moot.” Kat Socolov whispered to Harker, “I bet he didn’t even think of it until now.”

But Harker had more respect for the colonel than that. He just wondered if the contingency plan, whatever it was, did not involve sacrificial deaths. He couldn’t get out of his mind the image of that freebooter down here, probably naked, certainly at least as defenseless as they were, possibly stalked by something or someone running from the Titans themselves, knowing that his information was valuable but that he himself could not leave.

The mission, the colonel had said over and over again, was the only thing that mattered. Strong talk for a soldier for hire, but, unlike the pirate, not all of them would need to die to get that information out.

“How well do you think we’ll fit in down here in the Stone Age?” Harker asked her in a loud whisper.

She stared at him. “You really think it’ll come to that?”

“It could. That’s the most likely scenario, at least temporarily, maybe permanently if they don’t find a way to get us off.”

She shrugged. “We haven’t really been tested on much yet here, even with the loss of our stuff. This place almost seems designed to let a small number of people live on, so long as they remain apes who talk.”

“Huh?”

“Look at us! The climate’s warm enough all year to keep us comfortable like this, there’s a year-round growing season for edible fruits and even vegetables, as we’ve found, if you know how to look for them. Plenty of water, and no large predators. The trick is to not draw any attention to yourself, so no fires, no building of structures—in effect, no real artifacts. We’ve grown comfortable under those rules in just a few days. Imagine what being like that for maybe fifty, sixty years has done to the survivors. I’m already losing track of time. One day looks like another, one grove or one field of tall grass looks like another. I’m beginning to think that my life’s project is going to be myself.”

“Your watch still has a date in it,” he noted.