“That long.”
She fished in the neck of her blouse for the life-timer which hung between her breasts, flicked open the cover and read the numbers glowing at her. “This read almost sixteen when I got off the moons. It reads thirty now. Almost fifteen lifeyears.” She subsided, simmering.
He said nothing more but merely stood at the window, watching the darkness come down. Gradually she calmed as the quiet remained unbroken. In the kitchen, the settler crew finished cleaning up and left, one man poking his head through the door to ask what time they wanted breakfast.
“We said we were going walking,” Spiggy suggested, when the kitchener had gone.
She shook her head. “It occurs to me that going out in the dark to a place a settler was attacked by a large unknown predator may not be very intelligent.”
He nodded. “You have a point. Would you like a game of some kind? Chess, maybe. Or four-way?”
She shook her head, rose, and went to the window where she stood, looking out at the settlement. “What did you think of that temple. The one the kids rebuilt. Or say they rebuilt.”
“Do you really doubt they did it?”
She thought about it, trying to set her usual skepticism aside. “Not really, I guess. But I don’t believe they thought it up all by themselves.”
“Why is that?”
“Because of the amount of work involved. I looked at the ruined temples in the settlement. I estimate there’s somewhere between two thousand and twenty-five hundred square feet of mosaic in the floors with four or five hundred stones to the square foot. There’s over two thousand square feet of roof, with clay laid several inches thick over all of it. The labor involved …”
Spiggy shook his head at her, grinning.
“Why are you grinning at me?”
“When I was about eleven, back in Serena on Thyker, where I grew up, six of my friends and I built a clubhouse. We dug a tunnel over twenty feet long, shored it up and cased it with sponge panels we stole from a construction site. Then we dug a twenty-by-twenty cave, eight feet high. It took us one whole year, every spare minute we had. Nobody urged us to do it. Nobody even knew we were doing it. When we were finished with it, we used it half a dozen times, then we had some heavy rains and the thing collapsed, luckily not when we were in it. Kids do things like that. Of course, they’d think it was slavery if their parents wanted them to do it. Part of the attraction is that nobody knows, that it’s a secret.”
She shook her head at him. “I suppose that’s true, Spiggy, but the difference is that this temple isn’t going to collapse. Children can exert enormous amounts of energy, but when they build things, they usually do it as you and your friends did, not quite competently. They haven’t gained the experience and knowledge they would need to build competently. The temple we saw today couldn’t have been done better if the settlers had done it themselves under expert direction. I believe it’s exactly as it was originally. Where did the kids learn how?”
“Archives?” he suggested.
“Archives! When I knew we were coming to Settlement One, I looked up everything there is in the Archives about the God and the Departed and the ruins. There was never an architectural study done of the Bondru Dharm temple. It was occupied when the first settlers arrived, so Native Matters instructed that it not be disturbed. All Archives had were a few pictures of the outside, a sketchy floor plan and the verbal description given by the xenologists. Nothing else. Either there’s an unsung genius among the children, or …”
“Or the settlers are lying,” he suggested.
“Or the settlers are lying,” she agreed. “Someone helped the kids. Someone used the kids.”
“Are you sharpening your claws?” he asked gently. “Who are you out to get, Zilia?”
She turned to him, hands out and open, mouth making a lopsided grin. “I know what you all think of me, Spiggy. Everyone at CM thinks I’m crazy. Hell, everyone back at Native Matters thinks I’m crazy. Well, everybody thinks you’re crazy, too, with your ups and downs. And most people think Jamice has the terminal nasties. About the only sane one among us is Horgy, and he has this little satyriasis problem he keeps asking his friends and acquaintances to help him with.”
“And Dern,” grinned Spiggy. “Don’t forget Dern.”
“And Dern. Who is usually out in the settlements, running around in disguise, thinking no one knows who he is. Tandle actually runs CM, and anybody who doesn’t know that is blind, deaf, and has no sensation left in his extremities. So, we’re all mad in one way or another.”
“My question was, who are you out to get?”
“I learned growing up that people always exploit others if they can get away with it! My father exploited my mother and me. My grandmother exploited her sons and daughters and grandchildren; the Voorstoders exploit the Gharm. I was born a child and a girl and therefore a victim, and I didn’t like it. I want to stop there being other victims. So I go around accusing people of genocide and corporate torture and child-eating, watching to see if anybody turns pale. And no, I don’t believe what people tell me! Grandma always had a ready answer. My father always had a ready answer. In Voorstod, they’ve got a whole catechism of answers. I’m not ready to accept what people say. Almost always there could
