him made him realize all the problems that stood between dream and reality. “But, um, we still have Honored Pedure and the Kindred to contend with.”
Hrunkner remembered his walk through the bottom forest.And we stillhave to learn to live in the Dark.
The years seemed to come back down upon Sherkaner. He reached out to pet Mobiy, and set two other hands on the animal’s leash. “Yes, there are so many problems.” He shrugged, as if acknowledging his age and the distance to his dreams. “But I can’t do anything more to save the world till I get to Princeton. This evening is my best chance in a while to see how crowds react to the Dark. What did you think of our First Day of the Dark, Hrunk?”
Down from the heights of hope, head to head with the limitations of Spiderkind. “It was—scary, Sherk. We’ve given up all the rules one by one, and I saw what’s left down there this afternoon. Even—even if we win against Pedure, I’m not sure what we’ll be left with.”
The old grin wavered across Sherkaner’s aspect. “It’s not that bad, Hrunk.” He came slowly to his feet and Mobiy guided him toward the door. “Most folks left in Calorica are foolish old-money rich… you have to expect a little dissipation. But there’s still something to be learned by watching them.” He waved at the General. “I’m going to take a walk around the bottom of the ringwall, my dear. These young folks may have some interesting insights.”
Smith came off her pillows, walked around Mobiy to give her husband a little hug. “You’ll take the usual security team? No tricks?”
“Of course.” And Hrunkner had the feeling her request was deadly serious, that since twelve years ago Sherkaner and all the Underhill children were very good about accepting protection.
The jade doors closed softly behind Sherkaner, and Unnerby and the General were alone. Smith returned to her perch, and the silence stretched long. How many years had it been since he had talked to the General in person without a roomful of staff around? They exchanged electronic mail constantly. Unnerby wasn’t officially on Smith’s staff, but the fission-plant program was the single most important civilian part of her plan, and he took her advice as his command, moving from city to city according to her schedule, doing his best to build to her specs and her deadlines—and still keep the commercial contractors happy. Almost every day, Unnerby was on the phone to her staff. Several times a year they met at staff meetings.
Since the kidnappings… the barrier between them had been a fortress wall. The barrier had existed before that, growing year by year as her children grew; but before Gokna’s death, they could always reach over it. Now, it felt very strange to be sitting here alone with the General.
The silence stretched on, the two of them staring at each other and pretending not to. The air was stale and cold, as if the room had been shut for a long time. Hrunkner forced his attention to wander across the baroque tables and cabinets, all painted with a dozen colored varnishes. Practically every piece of woodwork looked a couple of generations old. Even the pillows and their embroidered fabric were in the overdone style of the Generation 58. Yet he could tell that Sherk really worked here. The perch on his right was by a desk littered with gadgets and papers. He recognized Underhill’s shaky penmanship in one title: “Videomancy for High Payload Steganography.”
Abruptly, the General broke the tense silence. “You did well, Sergeant.” She stood, and walked across the room to sit closer to him, on the perch in front of Sherk’s desk. “We had totally missed what the Kindred had discovered here. And we’d still be clueless if you hadn’t brought the matter up with Thract.”
“Rachner set up the operation, ma’am. He’s turned out to be a good officer.”
“Yes… I’d appreciate it if you’d let me do any follow-up on this with him.”
“Sure.” Need to know and all that.
And then there was more silence with nothing to say. Finally, Hrunkner waved at the absurd pillow furniture, the smallest worth a sergeant’s yearly salary. Except for Sherk’s desk, there was not a sign of either of his friends in this place. “You don’t come here often, do you?”
“No,” she said shortly. “Sherk wanted to see how people live after the Dark—and this is as near as we could get to it before we all do it ourselves. Besides, it seemed like a safe place to bring our youngest.” She looked at him defiantly.
How not to make an argument out of this? “Yes, well I’m glad you sent them home to Princeton. They’re… they’re good cobblies, ma’am, but this is not a good place for them. I had the strangest feeling down there on the bottom. The people were afraid, like the old stories about folks who don’t plan and then are left alone in the Dark. They don’t have any goal, and now it’s Dark.”
Smith sat a little lower on her perch. “We’ve got millions of years of evolution to battle; sometimes that’s harder to deal with than nuclear physics and the Honored Pedure. But people will get used to it.”
That was what Sherkaner Underhill would have said, all smiling and oblivious of the uneasiness around him. But Smith sounded more like a trooper in a hole, repeating the High Command’s assurances about enemy weakness. Suddenly he remembered how thoroughly she had shuttered every one of the windows. “You feel the same as I do about it, don’t you?”
For a moment he thought she would blow up. Instead, she sat inscrutably silent. Finally, “…You’re right, Sergeant. As I said, there’s a lot of instinct we’re running up against.” She shrugged. “Somehow, it doesn’t bother Sherkaner at all. Or rather, he knows the fear and it fascinates him, just another wonderful puzzle. Every day he goes down to the crater bottom and watches. He even mingles, bodyguards and guide-bug and all—you have to see it to believe it. He would have been down there all today if you hadn’t shown up with your own kind of fascinating puzzle.”
Unnerby smiled. “That’s Sherk for you.” Maybe he was on a safe topic. “Did you see how he lit up when we talked about my ‘magic rock dust’? I can’t wait to see what he does with it. What happens when you give a miracle to a miracle worker?”
Smith seemed to search for words. “We’ll figure out the rock dust, that’s certain. Eventually. But… hell, Hrunkner, you deserve to know. You’ve been with Sherk as long as I have. You noticed how his tremor is getting worse? The truth is, he’s not aging as well as most in your generation.”
“I noticed he’s frail, but look at all the results coming out of Princeton these days. He’s doing more than ever.”
“Yes. Indirectly. Over the years, he’s brought together a larger and larger circle of genius students. There are hundreds of them now, scattered all over the computer net.”
“…But all those papers by ‘Tom Lurksalot’? I thought that was Sherk and his students being coy.”
“That? No. That’s… that’s only his students being coy. They play anonymous games on the net; they make credit-taking into a guessing game. It’s just… silliness.”
Silly or not, it was amazingly productive. Over the last few years, “Tom Lurksalot” had provided breakthrough insights about everything from nucleonics to computer science to industrial standards. “It’s hard to believe. Just now, he seemed the same as always—mentally, I mean. The ideas seemed to come as fast as ever.” A dozen weird ideas a minute, when he’s on a roll. Unnerby smiled to himself, remembering. Flightiness, thy name is Underhill.
The General sighed, and her voice was soft and distant. She might have been talking about made-up storybook characters, not her own personal tragedy. “Sherk has had thousands of crazy ideas and hundreds of beautiful winners. But that’s… changed. My dear Sherkaner hasn’t come up with anything new in three years. He’s into videomancy these days, did you know that? He has all his old flamboyance, but…” Smith’s voice guttered into silence.
For almost forty years, Victory Smith and Sherkaner Underhill had been a team, Underhill producing an endless avalanche of ideas and Smith selecting the best and feeding them back to him. Sherk used to describe the process more colorfully, back when he thought artificial intelligence was the wave of the future: “I’m the idea- generating component and Victory is the crap-detector; we’re an intelligence greater than anything on ten legs.” These two had transformed the world.
But now… what if half the team had lost its genius? Sherk’s brilliant whimsy had kept the General on track as much as the reverse. Without Sherk, Victory Smith was left with her own assets: courage, strength, persistence. Was that enough?
Victory didn’t say anything more for a time. And Hrunkner wished that he could walk over and put his arms across her shoulders… but sergeants, even old sergeants, don’t do that to generals.
