Damocles (32 page)

But the Cartar administration guards had dragged one of The Searcher’s reporters out of the press conference. The Searcher himself would no doubt be asking questions the administration did not want asked. Some of those questions Loul alone among the Dideto knew the answers to. If he let him into the booth, if he opened Meg up to the inquisitive clutch of The Searcher, he might endanger his position at the landing site. Coupled with his requisitioning of the airvan, the generals might finally decide they’d had enough of upstart Loul Pell and yank him away from the site.

Screw that. The generals didn’t know that Meg and the Urfers were leaving. The generals didn’t know there was another ship within contact range of the ground crew. None of the other crews on-site communicated as well as he communicated with Meg; none of them. They needed Loul even more than they realized because Loul knew things no other Dideto knew. If he wanted to give The Searcher an exclusive, he would. If the only cool thing that had ever happened to Loul was getting ready to disappear, he planned on exploiting it while he could. When would The Searcher ever be interested in him again?

Loul gestured to the guard, who let the infamous reporter through the barricade. He was thinner than he looked on his webcasts, smaller, and the hair around his eyes was sparser than it appeared on screen. But as he leaned against the table, knuckles down with all the confidence of a Pummel coach about to win the season, Loul couldn’t help but feel a little cowed. His gaze riveted anyone who met it; his body moved with compact surety that made him seem like a man with a mission. Even Reno Dado, who had never been a fan, sat up a little straighter at his glance, her rose spot flushing just a little deeper as his eyes moved over her.

“Loul Pell?” The Searcher straightened up to his full height. “They call me The Searcher. It’s an honor to meet you.” Loul hooked his fingers with the man’s in a hearty fist clamp, with the same masculine grasp that he and Hark and Po had pretended to do for years, laughing and imitating their hero. This was no imitation though. This was The Searcher, and this was his handshake, and as the words left the older man’s mouth, Po sighed aloud. The camera whirred, closing in on a tight shot of The Searcher with Loul and Meg in the background.

Before Loul could decide just how much of the information he planned to share with the underground and unconventional
newsman, the camera spun in for an even tighter shot of Meg. The Searcher pulled the microphone from the holster on his leg and brought it close to Loul.

“What can you tell us about the massive Urfer ship that just came into orbit?”

This was no Baddo. He held a microphone and had a camera crew, but this guy was a far cry from the arrogant and badly dressed team that had led the press conference. For one thing he dressed more like the work crews at the landing site, his shirt a light fabric of pale red. It made Meg wonder if it might be an affectation. It seemed the darker the fabric, the higher the status. It made sense from a practical standpoint, she figured. On a planet with nonstop sunlight, fabrics would fade. To be able to keep your clothing dark would probably require care, to say nothing of an indoor job. She looked again at Loul’s pale tan shirt. The newcomer’s shirt wasn’t quite as pale but most definitely wasn’t vivid.

He made his impression with more than clothes. When he appeared over the shoulders of the guards, little Po had squeaked a sound she’d never heard from the Dideto. Po seemed an excitable fellow, but there was no mistaking the stutter in the thrums of Loul and his friends. She didn’t hear fear in them or anger as she had in the presence of Baddo. Their thrums, their eyes, the fold of their hands—everything changed with the appearance of the man in red.

He looked at Meg as if he knew her. In a sense he probably did. The posters hanging from the ceiling made it obvious that her face was well known on the planet. It wasn’t as if she could blend in or be mistaken for anyone else. While he didn’t gape at her the way so many of the onlookers did, he didn’t avert his eyes from her stare either. He met it with none of the teeth-gritting smugness that the previous reporters had shown. His expression was collected, settled. She wondered if he knew she could hear the jackhammer beat of his throat pulse. Whoever he was, he was good.

He asked Loul’s permission before approaching the table. She’d heard the rise in Loul’s thrum, wondering if this was a confrontation. She almost wanted to turn off the translator while she sat in the midst of this group. Words only distracted her from the audible body language. Strange too that the presence of so many Dideto in such close quarters only made Loul’s thrum and those of his friends easier to hear, as if they floated on a tide of sound that rose closer to her ear the more people were around them. To be honest, the whole experience made her feel a little drunk, dizzy with the unfamiliar sensation.

Then the man in red pointed a microphone and asked a question that shocked Loul breathless. Any goodwill, any benefit of the doubt evaporated at the pant of panic she heard her friend exhale and the shrill spike in his throat noise. Meg squeezed Loul’s hand. Loul stuttered, the translator making no sense of the jumbled sounds. When he turned to Meg, she could see the flush rising on the edges of his face.

She held her hand out, palm up toward the man in red. If he didn’t know what it meant, that was his problem. He seemed to get the gist of it, pulling the microphone back slightly, his expression settling into almost a smile. Meg had seen that same expression, that same reaction on dozens of Earther reporters ever since
the deep-space message had been translated. The look said, “It’s your move.” He must have sprung something upon Loul, and the camera swung in closer toward them.

With a quick snap, she flipped the light screen off of the table and up before her face. A short drag and it covered Loul’s as well, a transparent wall of light symbols and text boxes. The camera slid in closer and Meg could see the man in red lean in to peer at the images. Before his eyes could settle on any one image, Meg slid her finger along a control bar and the screen went opaque, visible only to her and Loul, impossible to see through on the other side. Another flick and the volume went down on the speaker patches. It would only give them a few moments of privacy but she thought Loul could use it.

“Dideto not see this. Dideto not see Loul and Meg. Not hear Loul and Meg.”

It took Loul less than a handful of seconds to react, hunkering down lower behind the screen and dropping his voice to a near whisper. The translator missed his first few words but she caught “see ship…see Urfer ship…not good.”

“Oh shit,” Meg said. Loul may not have understood the word but he seemed to be feeling the sentiment. “This man, this Dideto, Loul trust this man?” His knuckle bump lacked a certain enthusiasm but he stuck with it. She could hear the red-shirted man raising his voice and could see the camera trying to crane its way over the edge of the screen. She leaned in close to Loul, her nose brushing his. “Loul trust Meg? Yes? Meg trust Loul. Meg trust Loul…” She turned to the screen and dragged up the image of the quantifying wedge. She ran her finger to the widest part of the wedge, the maximum point. “Meg trust Loul this.”

He ground his teeth, eyes moving from the wedge to her eyes before bumping his knuckle toward the wedge. “Yes. Loul trust Meg this. Most. All. Loul Meg.” He held his hand up, palm
out, fingers stretched straight to reveal the tender pink pads. She smiled and pressed her longer, thinner hand against his. “Okay.” He smiled.

“Okay.” Pulling their hands apart they turned back toward the table just as the lens of the camera came into view over the screen. With one hand, Meg flicked the light screen back down against the table. With the other, she reached up and smacked at the camera orb, sending it swinging on its retractable arm.

Even he jumped when she hit the camera. Loul had seen how quickly the Urfers could move and he knew how remarkable their reach was, but this was the first time he’d seen the strength they could put into their movements. Meg’s hand was a blur, smacking the camera ball like a whip. It sounded like the camera operator might have fallen down behind the wall of the booth. She hadn’t hit it hard enough to damage it—orb cameras were designed to take rough landings—but he was pretty sure the operators weren’t equipped for an attack like this.

The Searcher crouched, as if preparing for Meg to leap across the table. Loul almost warned him that unless he had invented rocket packs in the last hour and a half, he probably wouldn’t be fast enough to catch Meg if she did decide to bolt. The Searcher looked a little disappointed when Meg settled down beside Loul, adjusted the light screen to normal visibility, and folded into herself as if nothing unusual had happened. Loul liked that approach and settled himself accordingly. He did trust Meg. Face-to-face with The Searcher, surrounded by friends and strangers alike, not having any idea how he was going to answer the question posed to him, Loul realized just how much he trusted her. Beside
her, aligned with her, he felt safe. He felt strong. And maybe it was vain and shallow, but he felt important.

“Would you care to explain what just happened, Mr. Pell?” The Searcher leaned into the camera’s view again. Loul knew what the shot would look like—the bristly brows of The Searcher just visible on the edge of the screen, larger and slightly out of focus, giving the man an almost supernatural appearance. That was fine. Loul had watched enough broadcasts of the show to know how to handle this.

“Allow me to explain.” Loul heard Hark snicker. How many hundreds of segments had they watched that began with those very words? He couldn’t help but slip into the serious, academic tone he’d heard dozens of experts use on the program. He saw the crease in Meg’s brow line, a subtle sign of curiosity at this new tone.

“You see, Meg and the rest of the Urfers have a complex and nuanced system of communication. I assure you, they are very attuned to the social dynamics going on around them, with or without a full Cartar vocabulary.” His eyes flitted to the screen where he saw text boxes filling as her program recorded his words. “They are also a very private people who prefer a chance to compose their responses rather than blurting. Under the circumstances, you can appreciate their desire to be understood as much as possible.”

“So you’re saying their responses to date have been carefully rehearsed? They don’t engage in spontaneity?”

Loul laughed in spite of himself. “You might want to ask your cameraman that question. Bet he didn’t see that slap coming. And you should see them in the rain. They love the rain.”

“Tell me.”

Loul considered the man before him, this legend of underground broadcasting. With two softly spoken words he transformed
from a polished, mythical Internet icon and infamous threat to the classified secrets of the Cartar Space Administration into just another curious nerd, with the same open-mouthed wonder of Po and needling curiosity of Hark. He didn’t frame himself in front of the camera and his microphone hung forgotten in his fist. Loul saw he had made eye contact with Meg, who stared back at him with a soft, closed-mouth smile, her body turned toward him. Loul knew well the effect of that posture.

“They’re beautiful. They throw themselves into the water, fly across it like waterbirds. The rocks break their skin but they don’t seem to care.”

The Searcher’s voice was a whisper. “Their skin looks like silk.”

“It feels even better. And it heals really fast. But the suns bother it if they stay out too long. Their skin turns red and looks sore and they’re careful to keep covered.”

The Searcher’s lips moved but no sound came out for several seconds, like he was having a silent conversation with himself. He nodded and then spoke a little louder. “That’s why they came during the Purpling.”

“What?”

Whatever trance Meg’s attention had cast over the reporter evaporated, and he pushed his knuckles down into the table. The camera moved into position, needing to adjust as Meg pulled back. With her keen attention to communication, Loul didn’t doubt that she saw the shift.

“The Purpling. Surely you haven’t forgotten. Come, come Mr. Pell. You can’t expect the people of Didet to believe that even at this momentous occasion you could forget the event.”

“Oh shit.” Loul automatically looked up through the ceiling, really noticing for the first time the rosy tone of the late Fa-pale. “Oh shit.”

“Dude.” Hark and Po spoke as one. Even Reno Dado looked shocked.

“I…I didn’t even…with all the excitement, I’ve totally lost track of time.”

“Time, Mr. Pell?” The Searcher leaned toward him, making room for the camera arm to follow his path. “We’re not talking about working through lunch break. We’re talking about the end of the Fa Decade, about a planetary event that happens once every generation.”

Hark leaned in and hissed. “We’re talking about the barbecue. Your parents are having like a hundred people over. We’re all packed to head out there. You forgot?”

Loul could only look around him, open-mouthed and speechless. He had forgotten. Not only had he forgotten, but judging from the conversations at the landing site, he’d bet most of the ground crews had forgotten as well. He could feel that flicker of terror flame up in his chest once again that somehow the Urfers had hypnotized them all, that they had a master plan. How else could an entire work site of people forget that within just a few shifts all the suns of Didet would drop below the horizon? Even Fa, the Ever Present Sun. It only happened once every eleven or twelve Red Years, maybe half a dozen times in anyone’s lifetime. Everything came to a stop at the Purpling. Everyone went home, everyone. As the Purpling moved over the planet, every family, every city, every country had their traditions and festivals and celebrations. Nobody forgot the Purpling. Nobody. Ever. Until now.