“What you know about warrior? You don’t seem like warrior man,” Rakki said.
“I know about life,” White Head replied. Rakki had little doubt that he had been assigned to keep an eye on Rakki as much as to keep him busy and useful.
“Oldworld life.” Rakki said. “Oldworld had great warriors? Make strong chief?”
White Head paused and thought, his eyes distant. “Not just warriors. Gods walked the earth then. Men were as gods. But they grew lazy.”
“What are gods?” Rakki asked.
“Like men, but with unimaginable powers. They built shining towers as high as mountains . . .”
“Towers?”
White Head looked perplexed, then made an expansive gesture with both arms. “Like long rocks that stand on end, but hollow. Caves inside. Thousands of caves, layer over layer, over each other, going up and up.”
“Thousand? What does thousand mean, White Head?”
“Many, many. More than leaves on a stick-seed tree. Chambers. Like you see in nests the ants make. They made giant birds and flew in them beyond the sky. Floating cliffs that crossed oceans of water vaster than all the land you have ever seen.”
Rakki had heard tell of a greater sky that lay above the sky, but he was unable to conceive what it meant. He was about to reply, when a foot kicked him in the back, sending him sprawling onto his arms, still clutching the stones he had been working. He whirled about to find Screecher leering down at him, standing arrogantly, hands on hips, as if lording over some lower form of life. “Mistameg send me, Dog Meat. You come talk real stuff now. We go three days, get bullet like you say. Leave two day from now. Today, tomorrow, you work.” Rakki climbed to his feet, his eyes blazing, forcing down the impulse to drive the sharpened hardstone into the Screecher’s face. “Bullet better be there, else Mistameg mad.” Screecher cackled inanely. “Then you end up dog shit, you see.”
One day, Rakki promised himself as he stumbled ahead under another kick. One day he’d settle the score. When he ruled the caves.
CHAPTER NINE
Keene stood in the store in Kropotkin, watching as Imel, the assistant, wrapped the synthetic sausage, a slab of “Mimas cheese”—processed from a coagulation of bean curds—carton of bread wafers, and the packs of reconstituted vegetables that Keene had selected, and added them to the bottle of wine and six of Celtic Dark beer in the plastic bags standing on the counter. On the shelf behind, there were also maybe half a dozen bottles of a distilled liquor called Tennessee Amber—smooth, mellow, reminiscent of a good Irish whiskey, which in his previous life Keene had been partial to. It was rare and highly valued. He stared at the tiny display and wrestled with himself inwardly.
The decision ought to have been simple—the bottles were there for the taking; there would be no call to justify himself or account to anyone. And yet, he hesitated. . . .
A quick calculus replayed itself in his mind. He had been back on Dione for two days, the first of which he had practically spent sleeping after several weeks of unceasing effort on Titan, in which the artificially maintained day-night cycles had ceased to have any meaning. To play their part in something that would one day revolutionize engineering and make the colony viable, Pang had said. Yes, dammit, he’d earned himself a drink, Keene decided. He nodded in the direction of the Ambers. “And one of those too,” he told Imel.
Imel took down a bottle, rolled a sheet of coarse paper around it, and added it to the contents of the bags. “Will that be all?”
“That’s it.”
“Enjoy your stay on Dione, Lan.”
“Thanks.”
“My pleasure.”
Keene picked up the bags, went out to the pedestrian way, and turned in the direction that led back toward Vicki’s. He didn’t really understand the details of the things happening inside his head, but he was becoming a Kronian—he had learned what “felt right.”
On Titan, Wernstecki had joined the Artificial Gravity project, which was moving at a pace that Keene still found astonishing, even after all his time here. Pang had insisted on calling the program to build a scaled-up engineering system “Gravestone”—from GRAVitic-Electromagnetic Synthesis Test ONE. The intention was to endow one of the rooms in the group’s lab area in the Tesla Center with earth-normal gravity as a demonstration.