said Andros. “One of a new breed. A product of genetic optimization. I was nurtured by an artificial placenta, and some would say that makes me an android rather than a man, but my genetic material was human in origin.”
“So the genetic engineering of people is no longer banned by law?” asked Remy, though the answer was obvious enough.
“It was considered to be a logical step in the development of new and more sophisticated fighting units,” said Andros, his musical voice precluding any hint of irony from creeping into his tone.
“And what are you doing here?” asked Remy.
“Gaining experience,” replied the optiman lightly. “There are several hundred of us scattered through this zone—perhaps a dozen on Haidra itself, attached to units of various kinds. As there are very few units on any kind of active service now, it was considered desirable that I should accompany this platoon.”
“I see,” said Remy. He turned back to Scapaccio, and said, “You’d better load up. I think the caravan is just about ready to get moving again. I don’t think there’ll be any more trouble, but the sooner we’re in Ziarat the better. Then we can discuss the matter of your going into the Syrene.”
“I don’t think we ought to take orders from this man,” said Garstone casually to Scapaccio. “In fact, I think we ought to arrest him.”
Remy laughed briefly, without any real humor. “That would be stupid,” he pointed out. “You need me. In fact, you don’t realize how much you need me. I can get you what you need in Ziarat, and I might even be able to get you into the heartland of the Syrene, if that’s really where you want to go. Is that what you want?”
As he spoke the last few words his eyes were fixed on Scapaccio’s face, and he saw there that this was, indeed, what the other man wanted—and it seemed to be something that he wanted very badly.
“I take it,” said Scapaccio dryly, “that you’re for hire.”
“Very much so,” replied Remy.
CHAPTER FOUR
Inside the wagon the bright sunlight was softened somewhat—the sections of the plastic cupola were translucent but not transparent. Their color was yellowish brown, and the light that streamed through them made the faces of those within look distinctly jaundiced.
There were bunks inside the wagon for four people, stacked two on two, with space at head and tail for stacked boxes. Beneath the lower bunks there were fitted drawers. In one of the lower bunks there was a man sleeping. He was under sedation. Ramon Delizia lay on the opposite bunk staring into a microfiche reader, occasionally flicking the control switch with his forefinger. He looked up when Scapaccio climbed in over the tailboard, followed by Remy.
Remy took the sheet from Melcart’s body and inspected his wounded leg carefully, stripping away the dressing with surprising delicacy.
“He’ll do,” pronounced Remy, when he was through. “He’ll be able to keep the bullet in a jar on his desk.”
Scapaccio sighed with relief. “That’s something,” he said. “Of course, it had to be that the one man who ended up needing an operation was the doctor. I doubt if any of us could have taken the bullet out.”
“All you had to do was ask the caravan master to have his own doctor take over,” said Remy. “That’s all I did. Your interpreter could have done the same.”
“Maybe if you’d arrived sooner,” Delizia interposed, “we could have saved Verdi. Justina didn’t quite get around to asking the veich for help while he was still alive.”
Remy shook his head. “The rifles the er’kresha are using are long-bore things with a relatively slow muzzle velocity. Not much range, but the shells don’t need to hit a vital organ to smash you up irredeemably. I’ve seen people hit in the arm die of the shock. The doctor was lucky. The bullet that got him was Calvar-made—stolen or plundered from some siocon farmer near Ziarat and traded halfway across the continent since. That was probably the last round of ammunition he had for it.”
“And that makes him lucky?”
“If he’d stopped the next one,” said Remy, “he’d be dead.”
“I suppose that in time the er’kresha will all have veich weapons,” said Delizia. “After all, if the veich have factories turning out rifles for the sioconi, the sheer mass of the supply will ensure that in the end they’re liberally distributed throughout Azreon.”
“If the band that attacked you had had twice the strength and a more favorable time of day,” said Remy sourly, “they wouldn’t have needed Calvar rifles. They’d have had your guns—automatic rifles that can fire a dozen rounds in a ten-second burst and reload before the other guy can draw breath, grenades, a heavy machine gun and Earth knows what else. The veich show a damn sight more discretion than you do.”
Scapaccio intervened quickly, “I’m surprised that the Calvars can maintain factories turning out weapons like yours,” he said, pointing to the rifle slung across Remy’s shoulder. “There are supposed to be no accessible fossil fuels on this world since the mapirenes stripped it thirty thousand years ago. The sioconi and the colonial veich are supposed to be dependent on a wood-based energy economy as far as metalworking is concerned.”
“They are,” replied Remy. “But the siocon farmers in the south have been persuaded to go in for the right cash crops, including a kind of cane that produces sweet carbohydrates in its core and can be rendered into high-grade charcoal itself. Ziarat’s gradually committing more and more land to that kind of crop because with advice from the veich the yield of the cultivated land in terms of staple crops has been increased four- or five-fold. The next stage will be using the sugars to produce alcohol to drive internal combustion engines. There may be no coal or oil here—at least, none that can be easily extracted—but the veich can still produce a technological civilization, given time. And given the freedom to operate.”
Scapaccio did not respond to the challenge implicit in the last sentence, but went to the head of the bed where Melcart lay and produced a bottle of colorless spirits.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked Remy.
“Why not?” Remy replied.
Scapaccio produced three small tumblers made of clear plastic from the same box that had contained the bottle. He splashed liquid into each of them in a deliberately careless manner, and then passed one to Delizia and one to Remy. Before he could take up his own, the wagon jarred slightly as it hit a rut in the road, and some of it splashed out, though the tumbler did not fall over. Silently, he replaced the lost liquid.
“What makes you think that there was once a mapirene base in the Syrene?” asked Remy casually.
“As you probably know,” said Scapaccio, “there was practically nothing left of the base in Omer. Nothing recoverable. That’s the story all over the known universe. It’s easy enough to figure out that either the mapirenes or the cascarenes held these worlds at one time, but difficult to find out much more. Thirty thousand years is a long time, and most of the sites we know about were blasted out of existence by very powerful weapons. But the products of a technology like that can be very durable—certain aspects of it, anyhow. It’s not too difficult to find what remains of mapirene buildings, and sometimes mapirene machines. Metal casings rust, but they hold their form. Plastics can last almost forever, provided that they aren’t attacked by the wrong kind of bacteria. Here and there, we find relics which tell us a good deal, and sometimes we recover the remains of information storage systems from which a little bit of the information can still be retrieved. We can rarely get all of it—usually a very small fraction—but with the right equipment we can recover some.
“Most of what we find is incomprehensible. Most of what we can understand is useless. But here and there we find something that tells us a little more about the mapirenes. One particular information disc, excavated out of an exceptionally well-preserved site on Kilifi, proved to contain what we think is a reference to a