quartermaster uniform, very much like Strut Greenval used to wear. Her figure was almost as lean and delicate as ever, though her gestures seemed a little inflexible. Hrunkner followed her back through the security section, and then up winding wooden stairs. “We’ve had some good luck on this one, Sergeant, you catching Sherk and me so close to your discovery.”
“Yes, ma’am. Rachner Thract set up the itinerary.” The stairs circled round and round between jade walls. Closed doors and an occasional darkened room showed to the sides. “Where are the children?” The question slipped thoughtlessly out of him.
Smith hesitated, certainly looking for some complaint in his words. “…Junior enlisted a year ago.”
That he had heard. It had been so long since he had seen Little Victory. He wondered how she would like the military. She had always seemed a tough little cobblie, but with a piece of Sherkaner’s whimsy. He wondered if Rhapsa and Little Hrunk might still be around.
The stairs emerged from the crater wall. This part of the residence presumably had existed in the early part of the Waning Years. But where before there had been open courts and patios, now triple-paned quartz stood strong against the Dark. It dimmed all the far colors, but the view was naked and stark. The city lights glittered across the bottomland, circling the heat-red lake at the center. A cold fog hung in the air above the water. It glowed dimly with all the light from below. The General pulled the shades on the view as they ascended toward what must have been the original owner’s high perch.
She waved him into a large, brightly lit room.
“Hrunk!” Sherkaner Underhill emerged from the overstuffed pillows that were the room’s furniture. Surely these were furnishings of the original owner. Unnerby couldn’t imagine either the General or Underhill choosing such ornaments.
Underhill trotted awkwardly across the room, his enthusiasm overmatching his agility. He had a large guide- bug on a leash, and the creature corrected his course, patiently bringing him toward the entrance. “You’ve missed Rhapsa and Little Hrunk by a couple of days, I’m afraid. Those two aren’t the cobblies you remember; they’re seventeen years old now! But the General didn’t approve of the atmosphere around here, and she shipped them back to Princeton.”
Behind himself, Hrunkner saw the General glower at her husband, but she made no comment. Instead she walked slowly from window to window, pulling the blinds, shutting out the Dark. At one time, this room had been an open gazebo; now there were a lot of windows. They settled themselves. Sherkaner was full of news about the children. The General sat in silence. As Sherk launched into Jirlib and Brent’s latest adventures, she said, “I’m sure the Sergeant isn’t that interested in hearing about our children.”
“Oh, but I—” Unnerby began, then saw the tenseness in the General’s aspect. “But I guess we have much else to talk about, don’t we?”
Sherk hesitated, then leaned forward to stroke his guide-bug’s carapace fur. The creature was large, must have weighed seventy pounds, but it looked gentle and smart. After a moment, the bug began purring. “I wish the rest of you were as easy to please as Mobiy here. But yes, we do have a lot to talk about.” He reached under a filigreed table—the thing looked like a Treppen-dynasty original, something that had survived four passages through the deepnesses of some rich family—and pulled out one of the plastic bags that Hrunk had brought from High Equatoria. He set it on the table with a thump. Wisps of rock flour spread across the polished wood.
“I boggle, Hrunk! Your magic rock dust! What put you on to this? You make one little detour—and bag a secret that all our external intelligence had totally missed.”
“Wait, wait. You make it sound like somebody fell down on the job.” Some people might look very bad unless he set things straight. “This was outside channels, but Rachner Thract cooperated with me one hundred percent. He loaned me the two cobbers that I came in with. More important, it was his agents at High Equatoria—you know the story?” Four of Thract’s people had trekked across the altiplano, brought back that rock flour from the Kindred’s inner refinery.
Smith nodded. “Yes. Don’t worry, I blame myself for missing this. We’ve gotten too confident with all our technical superiority.”
Sherkaner was chuckling. “Quite so.” He poked around in the rock flour. The lights in here were bright and full-color, much better than down in airport customs. But even in good light, the powder looked like nothing more than shale-colored dust—upland equatorial shale, if one were well-trained in mineralogy. “But I still don’t see how you came upon this—even as a possibility.”
Unnerby leaned back. Actually, the pillows felt pretty good compared with third-class passenger webbing. “Well, you remember, about five years ago, that joint Kindred-Accord expedition to the center of the altiplano? They had a couple of physicists who claimed gravity was screwball there.”
“Yes. They thought the mine shafts there would be a good place to establish a new lower boundary for the equivalence principle; instead they found big differences, which depended on the time of day. As you say, they got screwball answers, but they retracted the whole thing after they recalibrated.”
“That’s the story—but when I was putting in the power plant for West Undergate, I ran into one of the Accord physicists from that expedition. Triga Deepdug is a solid engineer, even if she is a physicist; I got to know her pretty well. Anyway, she claimed that the experimental method on that first expedition was fine, and that she was squeezed out of later participation…. So I began to wonder about that huge open-pit mining operation the Kindred started on the altiplano just a year after the expedition. That’s almost centered on the physics site—and they had to build five hundred miles of rail to serve it.”
“They found copper,” said Smith. “A good strike, and that’s no lie.”
Unnerby smiled at her. “Of course. Anything less and you would have tumbled to it right away. But still… the copper mine is a marginal operation. And my physicist friend knows her business. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be nice to see what’s going on there.” He waved at the bag of rock powder. “What you see there is from their third-level refining. The Kindredian miners had to go through several hundred tons of Equatoria shale to filter out this little packet. My guess is they filter it another hundredfold before they get their final product.”
Smith nodded. “And I’ll wager that is kept in harder vaults than the Tiefer holy gemstones.”
“Sure. Thract’s team didn’t come close to the final product.” Hrunkner tapped at the rock powder with the tip of one hand. “I hope this is enough that you can prove we found something.”
“Oh, it is. It is!”
Unnerby stared at Sherk in surprise. “You’ve had it hardly four hours!”
“You know me, Hrunk. This may be a vacation resort, but I’ve got my hobbies.” And a laboratory to pursue them, no doubt. “Under proper lighting, your rock flour weighs almost half a percent less than otherwise…. Congratulations, Sergeant, you’ve discovered antigravity.”
“I—” Triga Deepdug had been so sure, but until now Unnerby hadn’t really believed. “Okay, Mister Instant Analysis, how does it work?”
“Beats me!” Sherk was practically vibrating with glee. “You’ve found something genuinely new. Why, not even the…” He seemed to be searching for words, then settled for: “But it’s a subtle thing. I ground a sample of the dust even finer—and you know, nothing floats off the top; you can’t distill the ‘antigravity fraction.’ I think we’re seeing some kind of group effect. My lab here isn’t up to doing more. I’m going to fly back to Princeton with this first thing tomorrow. Besides its magic weight, there’s only one strange thing I’ve found. These upland shales always have some diamond foram content, but in this stuff the smallest forams—the millionth-inch hexens—are enriched by a factor of a thousand. I want to look for evidence of classical fields in the dust. Maybe these foram particles mediate something. Maybe—” And Skerkaner Underhill was off into a dozen speculations, and plans for a dozen dozen tests to extract the truth from those speculations. As he talked, the years seemed to fall away from him. He still had the tremor, but all his hands had come away from his guide-bug’s leash, and his voice was full of joy. It was the enthusiasm that had pushed his students and Unnerby and Victory Smith to make a new world. As he spoke, Victory rose from her perch and came over to sit close beside him. She draped her right arms across his shoulders and gave him a sharp, rippling hug.
Unnerby felt himself grinning back at Sherkaner, captured by the other’s words. “Remember all the trouble you got into on the children’s radio hour? Saying ‘all the sky can be our deepness’? By God, Sherk, with this stuff, who needs rockets? We can hoist real ships into space. We can finally find out what caused those lights we saw in the Dark! Maybe we can even find other worlds out there.”
“Yes, but—” Sherkaner began, but suddenly weaker, almost as if getting manic enthusiasm reflected back on
