Starrigger

24

It was a brave dawn, the disk-edge of a molten sun just showing above the vanishing point of the Skyway. The land was flat, magnificently flat, the kind of terrain the Roadbuilders had favored. A film of low rust-colored grass covered everything from sky to sky, bisected by the black line of the road. A brave dawn, cloudless and clear.

We were taking a break before going on. We had spent all night finding the road, with Winnie's help, and now she was drawing her figures on some lading sheets with a pen that Roland taught her how to hold. He and the Teelies watched her draw, sitting with her in the grass by the road. The kid was inside the rig watching over Lori, who was less hysterical now. I told him to make sure she didn't fall asleep. It looked as if she would be all right.

It was quiet, no wind at all, and the land was empty all around. Before dawn, we had seen some lights off the road; farmhouses most likely, but they were few. This was virgin land.

I drew Darla aside.

'Make a short story long and tell me, Darla. Who are you? And what are you?'

'My name is Daria Vance,' she said, then took a deep breath. 'Surviving daughter of the late Dr. Van Wyck Vance.'

'And the legal lifecompanion of Grigory Petrovsky. No?'

'Grigory Vasilyevich Petrovsky. Yes. Or his widow.'

'Is that grief? Or hope, maybe?'

'Neither,' she answered quietly.

'All right, so much for what I know. What I don't know is who has the Roadmap.'

'You mean the real one, don't you?'

'I mean the one I brought back. It wasn't Winnie.'

'No, it wasn't. That's why I was willing to give her to Wilkes in exchange for your life.'

'But aren't Winnie's maps accurate?'

'I don't know that yet. They seem to be. Jake, you don't understand. Winnie was a total surprise to me, and when I made my contact with the dissident network on Goliath, nobody knew about her.'

'The contact. That wasn't Petrovsky?'

A grunt of ironic laughter. 'No.'

'Why did you shoot at the flitter?'

'For the reasons I told you about.' She turned to look at the sunrise. 'And of course, I didn't want to be Grigory's prisoner.'

'His prisoner?'

She looked at me intently, her small nostrils flaring. 'At no time was I working for Grigory during this.'

I settled myself in the grass. 'Darla, why don't you start from the beginning? Tell me the story of your life.'

She told me. About three years ago she was a graduate student at the University of Tsiolkovskygrad, and got involved with the dissident movement, peripherally at first, then more deeply. She found that the movement was vastly more organized than she had thought, but, like most revolutionary organizations, was confined to a small cadre of activists, in this case the usual assortment of bohemian hangers-on one finds around universities ? artistes-mangues, dropouts, perpetual students, oddballs, and other perennial types ? along with some genuinely idealistic younger students and seriously committed faculty. From this intellectual hub, the movement radiated out to the colonies to encompass a fair number of people from all walks of life. Politically, the movement was a hodgepodge of ideologies, from the beady-eyed right to the bearded, bomb-throwing left, with most everything in between, including a smidge of religious doctrine. (Wilkes had been halfway justified in suspecting the Teelies, though Darla was fairly sure that they had no formal affiliation with the movement.) Then, at a dinner party her father gave, Darla met Petrovsky, who took an immediate interest in her. The interest was not mutual. However, the dissidents thought it a dandy idea to have a pair of ears in the same bed with a high-ranking Militiaman, especially an intelligence officer. Darla was asked if she were willing to make the supreme sacrifice. She was. It wasn't very long after the signing ceremony that Darla was approached by her lifecompanion's superiors and asked to become an informer ? asked, in fact, to inform on friends who were suspected of being subversive. For some reason, possibly because of who and what her father was, it never occurred to them that Darla might be a dissident herself. Why should she turn against her father and her class? (That the bureaucracy was a social class couldn't be doubted, though to speak of it as such a thing was ideological heresy.) And hadn't she married within the Authority?

'In other words, you became something of a double agent.'

'Right,' she affirmed. 'It was exactly what the movement was hoping for. We were then in a position to feed disinformation to the Authority.'

'All right,' I said. 'Now, from what I've gathered, this Roadmap is real enough, and so was my backtime trip. Okay. When did I come back? And who did I give the map to?'

'About eight months ago, you barged into Assemblywoman Marcia Miller's office and dropped it on her desk. I think your exact words were, 'Happy birthday, honey.''

'That's all I said?'

'No, otherwise she would have taken you for a crank, and the thing would still be on her desk, probably being used as a paperweight. You mentioned my name and the fact that I was a double agent, and that you knew, quote, 'all there was to know about the dissident movement,' unquote ? and told her what the object was.'

'Wait a minute. Was her office de-bugged?'

'At the time, yes, or so I was told. And since the Authority didn't immediately act to seize her and the map, it probably was.'

'Okay. I have more questions about the map, but let me clear up some other things first. How did you get assigned to me? And who assigned you?'

'The network did. Around the same time when you came on the scene, my situation vis-a-vis the Authority became untenable. We learned then that the Authority's infiltration of the movement was very deep, a fact even I hadn't been able to uncover, but you have to remember that I was primarily a conduit for bogus information from the movement to the Authority. 'And when my disinformation started sticking out like a sore thumb, I was compromised. I had to go underground.' She smiled wanly and shook her head. 'A misnomer. There is no underground. I took to the Skyway, as everyone does who wants to stay loose.' She ran her fingers gently through the grass. 'That was when Grigory got kicked upstairs to his dead-end job.'

'And when your father became an unperson?'

'No. His trouble goes farther back.'

I mulled it all over for a while, then said, 'Here's a very big question. When you first got in my rig, why did you act as if we'd met before?'

'I wasn't acting. The first time was about two months after you gave the map to Miller. We had been tailing you. For some reason, it was very easy, and since I've gotten to know you better, I can't help but think that you wanted to be tailed.'

'Where did I go?'

'From planet to planet, no particular pattern to it.'

'Was I alone?'

'Yes. Just you and Sam.'

'And you tried to pump me about maps and things, but got nowhere.'

'Exactly. I gave up and ducked out on you, and we dropped most of the surveillance. By that time our technical people had had a chance to examine the object you handed over. It was apparent to them that the thing was a product of an unknown technology.'

'But they weren't sure it was a map?'

She nodded. 'Oh, yes, they were sure. But the nature of the data was so complex, it was practically indecipherable. I was told to find you and try again to get more information. By that time, it seemed everyone in creation knew about you, about the map, everything. We then got a report that you were seen in Hydran Maze. You