Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories

"I'm very glad to hear that," Kulasawa said. "But I would still like to come aboard."

"To study us, I presume?"

I looked up at Kulasawa in time to catch her cold smile. "And to allow you to study us, as well," she said. "I'm sure each of us can learn a great deal from the other."

There was a brief silence. "Perhaps," Enderly said. "Very well."

And on the dark mass below a grid of running lights suddenly appeared.

"Follow the lights to the colony's bow," Enderly continued. "There's a docking bay there. We'll use our comm lasers to guide you in."

"Thank you," I said. "We'll look forward to meeting you."

The laser winked out, and I keyed off the comm. "Well?" I asked Kulasawa.

"Well, what?" she countered. "You have your docking instructions. Follow them."

I had envisioned some kind of makeshift docking umbilical stuck perhaps to one of the hatchways we'd spotted on our approach. To my relieved surprise, the docking bay proved to be a real bay: a wide cylindrical opening leading back into the asteroid proper, fully equipped with guide lights and beacons. And, at the far end, a set of ancient but functional-looking capture claws that smoothly caught the Sergei Rock and eased it into one of the half dozen slots set around the inside of the open space.

"What now?" Kulasawa asked as we touched gently onto the bare rock floor and the overhead panel slid closed.

"We wait," I said, switching off the false-grav and fighting against the momentary disorientation as the asteroid's rotational pseudogravity took over.

"Wait for what?" Kulasawa demanded. This close to the asteroid's axis the pseudogravity was pretty small, but if she was suffering from free-fall sickness she was hiding it well.

"For them," Bilko told her, pointing out the viewport.

From a door in the far wall three people wearing milky-white isolation suits and gripping carrybag-sized metal cases had appeared and were making their slightly bouncing way toward us. "Off-hand," he added, "I'd say it's a medical team."

He was right. We opened the hatchway at their knock, and after some stiffly formal introductions we spent the next hour having our bodies and the transport itself run through the microbiological soup-strainer. Their borderline paranoia was hardly unreasonable; with 130 years of bacteriological divergence to contend with, something as harmless to us as a flu virus could rage through the colony like the Black Death through Europe.

In fact, it was something of a mild surprise to me when, after all the data had been collected and analyzed, we were pronounced safe to enter. The team gave each of us a broad-spectrum immunization shot to hopefully protect us from their own assortment of diseases, and a few minutes later we were all finally riding down an elevator toward the colony proper.

The ride was longer than I'd expected it to be, and it wasn't until we were well into it that I realized the elevator had been made deliberately slow in order to minimize the slightly disconcerting mixture of increasing weight and Coriolis forces as we headed "down" toward the rim of the asteroid. Personally, I didn't have any trouble with it, but it appeared this was finally the combination that had gotten to Kulasawa's heretofore iron stomach. Her eyes gazed straight ahead as we descended, the expression on her face one of tight-lipped grimness. I watched her surreptitiously, trying not to enjoy it too much.

Considering the historic significance of our arrival, I would have expected a good-sized delegation to have been on hand. But apparently this wasn't a society that went in heavily for brass bands. Only three people were waiting for us as the elevator doors opened: two stolid-looking uniformed men, and a slender woman about Kulasawa's age standing between them.

"Welcome to the Freedom's Peace," the woman said, taking a step forward as we stepped out. "I'm Suzenne Enderly; call me Suzenne."

"Thank you," I said, glancing around. We were in a long room with an arched ceiling and no decoration to speak of. Set into the wall behind our hosts was a

pair of heavy-looking doors. "I'm Captain Jake Smith," I continued, returning my attention to the woman. "This is my first officer, Will Hobson; my engineer, Rhonda Blankenship; my musicmaster, Jimmy Chamala. That one's a little hard to explain—"

"That's all right," the woman assured me, her eyes on Kulasawa. "And you must be Scholar Andrula Kulasawa."

"Yes, I am," Kulasawa said. "May I ask your title?"

Suzenne tilted her head slightly to the side. "What makes you think I have one?"

"I recognize the presence of authority," Kulasawa said. "Authority always implies a title."

Suzenne smiled. "Titles aren't nearly as important to us as they obviously are to you," she said. "But if you insist, I'm a Special Assistant to King Peter."

I felt a stir go through us over that one. The traditional concept of hereditary royalty had long since vanished from the Expansion's political scene, though it was often argued that that same role was now being more unofficially filled by the Ten Families. Still, the idea of a real, working king sounded strange and anachronistic.

For some of us, though, it apparently went beyond merely strange. "A king, you say," Kulasawa said, her voice heavy with disapproval.

Suzenne heard it, too. "You disapprove?"

For a moment the two women locked gazes, and I prayed silently that Kulasawa would have the sense not to launch into a political argument here and now.

Suzenne's two guards looked more than capable of taking exception if they chose, and getting thrown into the dungeon or whatever they had here was not the way I

had hoped to end what had become a long and tiring day.

Fortunately, she did. "I'm just a scholar," she told Suzenne, her voice going neutral again. "I observe and study. I don't pass judgment."

"Of course." Suzenne smiled around at the rest of us. "But I'm forgetting my manners, and I'm sure you're all anxious to see our world. This way, please."

She turned and walked back toward the door, the two guards stepping courteously aside to let our group pass and then closing ranks behind us. "Incidentally, the study team tells me you have several large crates aboard," Suzenne added over her shoulder. "May I ask what's in them?"

"Two of them contain my personal research equipment," Kulasawa said before I could answer. "The others contain food and some power lifters which we brought as gifts for you."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rhonda start. "Gifts?" she echoed. "But that's our cargo."

"Which if you'll recall I purchased from you," Kulasawa said, throwing a sharp look at her. "They're mine to do with as I choose."

Rhonda turned to me. "Jake?"

"That was part of the deal," I reminded her.

"Yes, but—" She broke off, an oddly betrayed look on her face.

"You're most generous," Suzenne said, pulling out a plastic card and holding it up to a panel beside the doors. "But I'm afraid we can't accept gifts. One of our techs will evaluate the items and issue you credit slips." The doors slid open, and we stepped out onto a wide, railed balcony—

And I felt my mouth drop open. Stretching out before us, exactly as Enderly had said, was an entire world.

It was like looking at a giant diorama designed to show young schoolchildren all the various types of terrain and landscape one might come across. Far below us, extending for at least a few kilometers, was what seemed to be a mixture of farmland and forest, marked by gentle hills of various heights and dotted with occasional clusters of houses. Numerous ponds were scattered around, glistening in the sunlight, and there was at least one river wending its way across the ground. Farther away, I could see what looked like a small town, then more greenery—grassland or more farms, I couldn't tell which—then more trees and buildings and finally the tall spires of an actual city.