‘No,’ Wilson said softly. ‘But you are a puzzle-solver.’
‘Oh, please!’
‘You have to admit it’s fascinating, almost paradoxical.’
‘I find it mildly interesting — in the abstract. I also happen to believe the solution lies with your original classification. Either way, it doesn’t matter. This is not a Directorate problem, unless you do give the governor what he’s asking for. If that were to happen I would order a very thorough investigation.’
‘Which nobody wants, and if you personally were to shut down a new planet to immigration, especially at this time, your meagre popularity would hit zero and then fall off a cliff.’
‘I’m not in this job for popularity.’
‘No, but you know very well that to function properly at the level your cases run at you have to have political influence. Securing that verdict against Oscar lost you every credit you won during the war. You can get that back with this case.’
‘It is not a case.’
‘Take a break, Paula. Christ knows you’ve accumulated enough leave time over the last century. That would leave you free to do whatever tweaked your curiosity. I could appoint you to any position you wanted in Farndale. Adviser to the Lydian territory governor, for instance.’
‘You have got to be kidding.’
‘It’s practical. It’s logical. It’s different. And you’d be helping a lot of people — actually, two species. I’m amazed you’re even hesitating.’
She wanted to tell him why, but couldn’t actually come up with a valid reason. The wretched thing was, it
‘That’ll be all you need,’ Wilson said with a grin.
The next morning Paula took a trans-Earth-loop train from Paris through the connecting wormhole to Madrid, then London, New York, and into Tallahassee, where she caught the express shuttle to Los Vada, an industrial world owned entirely by Farndale, which served as their manufacturing and financial base. Total time elapsed: forty-two minutes, which wasn’t bad for the notoriously piss-poor timekeeping of loop trains.
It was just after midnight local time on Los Vada when she arrived. The CST station there was enormous, a junction to over fifty worlds in phase two and three space; the commerce it had to carry was phenomenal, with over a thousand freight and passenger trains charging through every hour. There were five passenger terminals to cope with the volume of people, two of which were just for passengers arriving and departing Los Vada itself; the others were for interconnecting trains. Paula got off at the fourth, and took a small transfer capsule over to terminal five, which handled all the trains to planets in phase three space.
Her train left from platform 49H. Eight fat carriages crammed with refugee families, people who had fled their homeworld after the Prime assault wrecked the biosphere outside their city force fields. Since then they’d either been living with generous family members or endured Spartan accommodation in a government emergency transit centre. It was only in the last few months that the Commonwealth government was finally starting to get on top of the displaced populations problem and accelerating the opening of phase three space planets that had been in their provisional stage of development back when the war broke out.
The train trundled across the dark yard outside the huge terminal buildings, then slowly accelerated towards the distant cliff of machinery producing the wormholes. Over half of the circular rifts across interstellar space were open onto the daylight continents of their respective worlds, which shone an impressive variety of star-spectrums out into Los Vada’s moonless night. Menard was close to Sol’s standard white, with just a hint of violet staining the thick beam which the train track curved round to line up on. They slid in behind a long freight train whose open trucks were carrying big civil engineering bots, and construction machinery along with a host of infrastructure systems vital to support a planet whose population was currently expanding at a rate of thirty thousand a day, with a bump up to fifty thousand scheduled in four months’ time. According to Paula’s e-butler, trains were being pushed through with barely a minute’s separation.
Then they were through. The pressure curtain tingled across her skin like some fast phantom drizzle, and raw sunlight was blazing through the carriage windows. There was no sign of the wide open lands which Wilson prized so much on this world. Instead the two-mile length of track between the wormhole and the station ran straight through the marshalling yard, with stacks of containers forming a near-solid wall on either side. They formed their own mini-city, with avenues sliced by tracks where big old fission-powered shunters trundled along day and night. Giant loader gantries slid above the ever-changing stacks on eight-storey legs, malmetal tentacles reaching down to pull individual containers out of the stack and place them on the flotilla of trucks rolling along behind.
The CST planetary station was a lot more basic than usual, consisting of just five platforms, all prefabricated, and sheltering beneath a tinted polymesh dome which did absolutely nothing to cut down the equatorial sun’s intensity.
Gary Main was waiting for her on the platform as the train pulled in. He introduced himself as an aide to the Planetary President, a fourth-life Englishman five years out of rejuvenation, with a spiderweb of purple and yellow OrganicCircuitry tattoos mottling his face.
‘Wilson Kime assigned me to you for the duration,’ he shouted over the noise as everyone else thronged down the platform on their way to local trains. It was Farndale’s policy to simply shunt all the new arrivals on to the lands they were due to occupy as soon as they arrived. Nobody wanted a huge out-of-work population occupying the capital.
‘Thanks,’ Paula shouted back. ‘How do I get over to Jevahal?’
‘We have a plane waiting for you.’
Several of the nearby crowd paused to give them a look. A couple must have recognized Paula judging from the frowns. Or it could have been envy at her transport. They were all due up to a month on trains and ships and buses before they got to their promised patch of frontier dirt.
Wilson had laid on a ten-seat corporate hypersonic jet at the city’s single airport. Paula had to smile at that. He really was giving her mission top priority. Cruising speed was Mach eight, which gave them a flight time of two hours. Paula spent it reviewing the xenobiology team’s report on the Onid. After an hour’s reading she reluctantly concluded that the team’s original certification might have been correct — based on the research data provided. The Onid showed no sign of sentience, they were basic herd animals roaming the plains and forests of Jevahal. Each herd had its own territory, which they were fiercely protective of. They didn’t demonstrate even elementary tool-building, nor language. Their only communication was a few hooting sounds to alert each other of any danger. However, they did bury their dead. Each herd had an area set aside for their graves. They weren’t particularly neat, just holes scraped out of the soil. But the team had recorded them dragging bodies a long way from where they’d died to the herd’s burial ground. There were a lot of speculative notes on group identity, and rudimentary community awareness. A thesis backed up by the totem. Every Onid was buried with a totem: a stone or stick. They weren’t carved or shaped, but something was always dropped into the grave as the soil was scraped back over the corpse. It didn’t qualify as a presentience marker on any methodology the Commonwealth used to determine emerging awareness.
Paula didn’t know enough to make a judgement, but she certainly followed the tribal cohesion argument in the appendix. The conclusion was that the totems were simply instinct, like peeing on a tree, it marked territory.
The hypersonic landed on a field just outside Lydian’s latest boundary. The town had only been in existence for five months, its whole history could be measured in rings of construction activity like tree-years. Farndale had shipped in every building along a laser-straight highway of enzyme-bonded concrete that led all the way back to a port on the coast. The same colossal JCB roadbuilders that had extruded the highway had stayed on to lay out
