The Reaches

'What?' said Dupuy. 'What?'

The man in greasy trousers was either quicker on the uptake or more willing to act. He spun on his heel and started a long stride off the ramp-

And froze. Between him and escape were the officers from the featherboat, huge in their stained white hard suits. The Fed official drew himself up straight, nodded formally to Ricimer and Gregg, and turned around again.

'I'm afraid I'll have to ask you gentlemen to be our guests for a time,' Mostert continued. 'We'll pay at normal rates with Molt laborers for the supplies we take, I assure you. . but so that there aren't any misunderstandings, I'll be putting my own men in your fort and admin buildings. I'm sure you understand, Mr. Dupuy.'

If the Federation official made any reply to Mostert, his words were lost in the roar of the Hawkwood, landing with her plasma cannon run out for use.

22

Biruta

'Easy, easy. .' echoed Leon's voice through the fort's superstructure. Heavy masses of metal chinged, then clanged loudly together-the trunnions of a 15-cm plasma cannon dropping into the cheek pieces. 'Lock 'em down!'

'Look at this,' Ricimer murmured to Gregg in the control room below-and to Guillermo; at any rate, the Molt was present. Ricimer slowly turned a dial, increasing the magnification of the image in the holographic screen. 'Just look at the resolution.'

'Boardman, use the twenty-four-millimeter end, not the twenty-two!' Leon shouted. 'D'ye have shit for brains?'

The bosun's twenty-man crew was completing the mounting of the fort's armament. The heavy plasma cannon had been delivered by a previous Earth Convoy. In three days, the Venerians had accomplished a job that Federation personnel on Biruta hadn't gotten around to in at least a year.

On the other hand, the Feds in their heart of hearts didn't expect to need the fort. The Venerians did.

'This is what we'll have on Venus soon,' Ricimer said. 'This is what all humanity will have, now that we have the stars again.'

The five Venerian ships-the Grandcamp had vanished after the first series of transits, and only an optimist believed that she or her crew would ever be seen again-clustered together near the buildings at the north end of the island. Men were busy refitting the battered vessels for the long voyage back to Venus. They used Federation equipment as well as that carried by the argosy.

'All right,' Leon ordered. 'You four, torque her down tight. Loong, you and your lot are dismissed. Take the shearlegs and tackle back to the Tolliver with you. Anders, you're in charge here until you're relieved.'

Ricimer had focused on the Rose, eight hundred meters across the island. At the present magnification, Gregg could identify some of the crewmen fitting new thruster nozzles beneath the vessel. The holds gaped open above them, letting the sea breeze flow through the vessel.

'We could see right into the ship if the light was a little better,' Gregg agreed.

Guillermo said, 'The third control from the right.' His three jointed fingers together indicated the rotary switch he meant. 'Up will increase light levels above ambient.'

Ricimer touched the control, then rolled it upward. The edges of the display whited out with overload. Shadowed areas congealed into clarity beneath the ship, within the holds, and even through the open gunports.

'You've seen this sort of equipment before?' Ricimer asked.

The Molt flicked his fingers behind his palms in the equivalent of a shrug. 'It's a standard design,' he said. 'My memory-'

'Memory' was a more or less satisfactory description of what amounted to genetic encoding.

'— includes identical designs.'

'They'd have to be,' Gregg realized aloud. 'It's not as though the Feds built this. Their Molts did.'

The huge advantage the North American Federation had over other states was its possession of planets whose automated factories had continued to produce microchips for years or even centuries after the Collapse. When the factories finally broke down, they left behind dispersed stockpiles of circuitry whose quality and miniaturization were beyond the capacity of the present age.

Fed electronics were not so much better than those of the Venerians as greatly more common. But Fed electronics were better also. .

'Once Venus has its trade in hand,' Ricimer said, 'we'll do it properly. The Federation goes by rote-'

He nodded to Guillermo. Leon, muttering about the lazy frogspawn crewing some vessels he could name, clomped down the ladder serving the gun stations on the roof.

'— only doing what was done a thousand years ago. We'll build from where mankind was before the Rebellion-new ways through the Mirror, new planets with new products. Not just the same old ways.'

'Old ways is right,' Leon said as he entered the control room. 'Those guns we mounted, they're alike as so many peas. Men didn't make them, Molts and machines did. The Feds just sit on their butts and let the work do itself-like people did before the Collapse.'

Guillermo looked at the bosun. 'Is work by itself good?' the Molt asked. 'How can it matter whether you pull a rope or I pull a rope or a winch pulls the rope-so long as the rope is pulled?'

'Centralized production is sure enough bad,' Leon said. 'That's what caused the Collapse, after all. That and people having too much time to spend on politics, since they didn't do anything real.'

'It's more than that,' Piet Ricimer added. 'Machines can't create. They'll make the same thing each time- whether it's a nozzle or a flashgun barrel or a birdbath. When my father or even one of his apprentices makes an item, it has. .'

He smiled wryly to wipe the hint of blasphemy away from what he was about to say. 'A man's work has what would be a soul, if the work were a man rather than a thing.'

Guillermo's head moved from Leon to Ricimer, as if the neck were clicking between detents. 'And my race has no soul,' the Molt said. The words were too flat to be a question.

'If you do have souls,' Ricimer replied after a moment's hesitation, 'then in selling your fellows as merchandise, we're committing an unspeakable sin, Guillermo.'

Man and Molt looked at one another in silence. The alien's face was impassive by virtue of its exoskeletal construction. Piet Ricimer's expression gave up equally little information.

Guillermo cocked his head in a gesture of amusement. 'Things are things, Captain,' he said. 'But I'll admit that the number of things may be less important than how you use the things you have. And your Venus clan uses things very well.'

The Tolliver's siren began to wind.

'Damn the timing!' Gregg snarled. 'Leon, did the men from the Tolliver leave in the truck?'

The bosun pursed his lips and nodded.

'All right,' Gregg decided aloud. 'Piet, I'll run across to the flagship and find out what's going on. You can-'

Ricimer smiled. 'I think we can learn what's happening more easily than that, Stephen,' he said.

As he spoke, he tapped pairs of numbers into a keypad on the console. Each touch switched the holographic display, either to a lustrous void or an image:

An office in the island's administrative complex, where half a dozen Venerians had put down their playing cards when the siren blew;

A panorama from a camera placed a hundred meters above the empty sea;

Another office, this one empty save for a chair over which was draped the uniform jacket of a Federation