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THIRTY-FOUR A Shadow Among Shadows

Arthur Empleado was cold.

He hadn't thought it possible in these artificial tropics. At 390 million kilometers from the sun, 5023 Eris was a hothouse, every centimeter of the false upper surface provided by her biological canopy given to absorbing and hoarding sunlight. Yet he was chilled to numbness, almost to the bone.

It was possible that what he felt had less to do with temperature than with his exclusion from the group lounging around the campfire in the center of the hollow formed by the three shuttles. It had never been stated in so many words—no one would have dared, even given their isolation from Earth and the disrespect habitually shown him by the mission's highest-ranking officers—but as its principal KGB agent, charged with maintaining its ideological consistency, he wasn't welcome socially among its personnel, and he knew it.

On the other hand he was used to it. A likelier source for his present discomfort was the paper slip he fingered in his jacket pocket, a note left in his bunk earlier today. Now that he considered it, just the thought caused him to ache and shiver, shifting from one foot to the other in the shadows, watching his shipmates enjoy each others' company in a way forbidden to him, not only by current circumstances, but by a lifetime's habit and inclination.

 

dam oooo: wound my heart with monotonous langour

 

Ironically, he'd selected the code himself, expecting to hear it someday, planted in a transmission from Earth—never anticipating that he'd be reading it scrawled in ballpoint on a scrap little larger than a postage stamp. The historic phrase, lifted from an obscure poem and broadcast by the BBC 100 years ago, had informed French partisans, mostly Communists like himself, that the long night of fascist domination was about to end with the Allied invasion of Normandy. For him it meant orders were coming from the American KGB which would override every other duty and obligation. Assigned to the expedition as a civilian, he'd been secretly commissioned as an Aerospace Force general officer, the microfilmed documentation he carried dated retroactively to give him seniority over Gutierrez in the emergency which would constitute his only justification for revealing it.

He examined the gathering around the campfire with renewed professional interest. Among these unlikely candidates (and several others not present at this evening's festivities) who was his likeliest contact?

Lieutenant Colonel Juan Sebastiano was young to be commander—Empleado was annoyed at the untidiness of referring to a colonel as "captain"—of the McCain, or of anything else important. Empleado had always rated him as politically unreliable. He had a careless mouth with regard to authority and was personally loyal to Gutierrez. Empleado cherished plans for dealing with him when time and opportunity presented themselves. Of course the same apparent qualities might make perfect cover. Still, Empleado had a feeling for these things. He couldn't see Sebastiano as any sort of KGB agent.

Major Jesus Ortiz was a different matter. It was said that the new commander of the Hatch had ancestors, not all that remote, who thought it hilarious to skin the soles of a victim's feet and let him walk home across a broiling desert floor. He remembered reading that even the Apaches and Comanches were afraid of the Yaquis. Of course the rumor might be untrue. Empleado's personnel files, condensed for spaceflight, didn't go back that far, and Ortiz may not have inherited his forebears' sense of humor. That sort of sanguine ruthlessness wasn't the best test of an agent, anyway. He himself had a rather tender stomach when it came to the brute mechanics of interrogation, a failing he tried to make up for in other ways. Nevertheless, it wouldn't surprise him if his contact turned out to be Ortiz.

With the equivalent rank of major, there was his own subordinate, Roger Betal. The man was becoming a problem, his usefulness destroyed by a beating at the hands of this interloper Eichra Oren, and what had happened to his fellow enforcers Roo and Hake. Empleado had relied not only on Betal's martial arts, but his ability as a deceptively charming talker. Surprisingly, that ability was always less effective with female subjects than expected. Now he seemed to be avoiding Empleado, seeking the company of expeditionaries friendly with the so-called Elders and their pet human. Such a problem was best dealt with sooner rather than later—unless the whole thing was a brilliant ruse and Betal was the one who'd left the note in his bunk.

Empleado shook his head. This game he'd begun playing with himself was useless. The next person he considered was Rosalind Nguyen. As a physician, she was an ideal intelligence gatherer. And so were women, especially small, pretty ones. She saw crew members in their weakest moments and most vulnerable states of mind. Carrying the rank of captain lent her a measure of nonintimidating authority, while her ethnic origin and the political background it implied might lead them to believe she'd be sympathetic with their discontents, since she was ideologically suspect simply by being what she was.

He'd never say that the government of the ASSR was racially motivated—not within hearing of his superiors and at the same time hope to continue occupying a position within that government himself. It was wise to avoid the habit of even thinking it too frequently. But one look at personnel distribution, at the disproportionate number of Hispanics and Blacks and their relative ranks within the Aerospace Force, would convince anyone that it was more fashionable these days to lay claim to certain ancestors, or to possess certain surnames, than others.

Someone passed a guitar to First Lieutenant Lee Marna, life-support technician for the McCain. She let her fingers ripple across the nylon strings, singing of "the strangest dream I never had before."

There was an alarming number of amateur musicians with this expedition. If it were within his power he'd have forbidden it. A guitar was worse than a loaded gun. Homemade music, like homemade humor, was inherently subversive, especially made by an attractive young woman whose cornsilk hair and fair complexion—opposing the officially encouraged physiognomy he'd been thinking about earlier—drew attention to the performance. In the interest of state security, entertainment must be left to carefully winnowed specialists. He'd always argued that the greatest danger to authority was laughter (or any unsanctioned happiness, for that matter) which the state had not provided as a reward for approved behavior and was not therefore in a position, as a punishment, to deny.

Empleado wasn't the only one watching the little blonde. Second Lieutenant Danny Gutierrez—now there was a thought: what if the general's son were the undercover agent? Young Gutierrez was a petty criminal, a smuggler and small dealer in forbidden goods. That would certainly provide him with credentials valuable to a covert agent of the KGB. What else did he know about the boy? He was Gutierrez's second son, the eldest having been killed in some particularly horrible manner during a recent unpublicized conflict in South Africa. Danny was a friend of Sebastiano's, to all appearances more the colonel's protégé than his father's. That placed him in position to keep an eye on Sebastiano, provided anyone in power felt the colonel was important enough to merit it. Or it might just represent precaution on the general's part. Like racism, nepotism wasn't unknown within the ASSR, but blatancy was a far greater failing.

Whatever his real status, it was obvious the boy might soon have another problem on his hands—and only on his hands, if he was lucky. He hadn't yet noticed the longing glances being cast his way by Demene Wise, making a first appearance in public since Eichra Oren had crippled one of his knees, possibly for life.

Before the mishap, Wise had been another of Empleado's informal "staff," with the equivalent rank of Master Sergeant. Empleado, preserving the tatters of the man's cover, hadn't visited him in the improvised sickbay and didn't know whether he'd show an inclination, like Betal, to avoid his superior. With that great cube of a head and his enormous shoulders, he still looked as if he'd been carved from basalt, but his sagging face had aged twenty years. The man had never seemed particularly bright, but in Empleado's present frame of mind, he considered sexual deviation as a KGB cover without rejecting it altogether. Wise's presence in the gathering was being tolerated, possibly for the doctor's sake. Aside from body language that belied his Herculean appearance, and his effeminate mooning over the general's son, he seemed to be enjoying the music as much as anyone.

As Marna played, firelight picked out the dark, bearded features of Staff Sergeant C. C. Jones, former TV star, now eyes and ears for American Truth and, rumor had it, an enemy of Horatio Gutierrez. Empleado wished he knew more about that. He always wished he knew more about everything. As usual, Jones was trying to steal the scene, lending conspicuous approval to whatever everyone else demonstrated they were enjoying, in this case, the pretty lieutenant's singing.

Of many types for which he had nothing but contempt, journalists held top position on Empleado's list, even above politicians. Anyone, from left to right, who'd ever been personally connected with an event that became news knew that they were incapable of getting the simplest story straight. Pre-Soviet American journalism had always gloried in its self-appointed role as watchdog over the rights of the individual. The truth was that during its long, self-congratulatory history, it had been more like a cur caught bloody-muzzled time after time, savaging the very flocks it had been trusted to protect.

No one knew better than the KGB that there is no such thing as "the news." Jones, his colleagues, and his predecessors peddled gossip, mostly in the form of horrible things happening to faraway strangers, things that might have happened to you and still might, unless . . . More ignorant than the nine-year-old minds they pitched to, dirtier than the ward heelers they supposedly kept an eye on, they were nothing more than merchants of fear, parasites feeding on calamities that bred more fear, and an ever more powerful state, a state that grew by promising to keep everybody safe from everything. Since the universe is an inherently unsafe place, it was a profitable symbiosis. The media might single out this incompetent bureaucrat or that corrupt politician, they might favor those whose paranoia dwelt on domestic dangers rather than foreign, but they never questioned the paranoia itself, or the wisdom of erecting a security state to assuage it. Over three centuries, they had never once taken the individual's side against the growth of government power.

Of course Empleado approved of the security state, and recognized the importance of journalists in creating and maintaining it. That didn't make associating with them turn his stomach any less.

Reflected firelight from Pulaski's glasses caught his eye, distracting him. The idea that this gangly, bespectacled female—what was the old-fashioned word?—nerd might be a high-ranking undercover operative for the KGB was so ridiculous he refused to consider it.

For similar reasons, he rejected machinist Corporal Roger Owen. Empleado's father, Salvador, had been a machinist, dragging himself home with blackened nails, reeking of overheated solvents, slouching in a dilapidated armchair swilling rationed cervesas while Arturo's mamacita fried the evening tortillas and beans, watching propaganda on TV as if it meant something. How he'd longed to get out of that house—however well it reflected the proletarian ideal—out of that self-consciously blue-collar life, to do something that would leave his hands clean after a day's work, to get a glimpse of what lay behind the propaganda, to make something important of himself.

It wasn't that he hadn't loved them in his way. Father, like son, was an ardent if naive Marxist, loyal to his union and the socialism it buttressed almost as solidly as journalism did. But Empleado distrusted all men who worked with their hands. They were too bound up in the concretes of life, unable to detach themselves from petty facts. They insisted that philosophy and politics make sense—dollars and cents—unable to see that nobody interested in accruing power had anything to gain by limiting himself to the mundane. Besides, he thought, if Owen had written that note, it would have been in soft pencil, with greasy thumbprints around the edges.

As Marna finished her song, Rubber Chicken Alvarez, last and by any measure least of the group around the fire, became the life of the party, impersonating Jerry Lewis, telling jokes he laughed at loudest himself. In other circumstances he'd have been wearing a lampshade on his head. Empleado was confident these would-be Robinson Crusoes would be weaving him one next week, of bean sprouts or whatever the corporal was cooking in his cast-iron pot. If he'd had to stake his life on it, Empleado believed he'd bet on Carlos the Clown, preparer of food, disposer of garbage, maker of practical jokes, as his spy. He fit his role as village idiot too perfectly. He played the fool too well.

 

dam oooo: wound my heart with monotonous langour  

 

It could only mean "the dam at midnight." Glancing at his watch, he slipped from the camp, headed for his rendezvous. It didn't take him long to get there. "Dam" was an ambitious term for the barrier of meteoric stone (carbonaceous chondrite, comprising most of the asteroid, was too crumbly) piled across the stream where it came nearest the camp. The idea was to raise the level to obtain running water. Sebastiano, who'd taken charge of the project, still hadn't any idea what he was going to use for pipes—plastic provided by the Elders, or the hollow trunks of bamboolike plants.

The site had been chosen for more than proximity. Here also the stream passed through a gully which, once full, would make a natural reservoir. The gully itself was probably a deformed impact crater, a random feature of a terrain that had never been shaped by moving air or water until the Elders had recently created an atmosphere. At the moment, the dam was less than a meter high—Sebastiano's men were having to go further afield in search of suitable rocks to add to it—and the water less than half that depth.

Empleado heard a noise, turned, and was blinded by intense light. In the next heartbeat, someone was standing beside him turning a small, black, knurled-aluminum flashlight downward to shine on the thin slip of plastic which served each expedition member as ID and—with information retrieval equipment—a dossier on the person it was issued to. This one was unique, its back surface consisting of a hologram. Seeming to float above the card was the curved, elaborate shield of the KGB.

"Satisfied, Comrade?" came a whispered voice.

"You!" Empleado couldn't help gasping.

 

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