Beth smiled at the thought but sighed in a way that said it would be a long time yet.
“And we have news from Kronia,” Gallian announced to all of them. “The latest there is that Urzin and the Congress have finally pulled rank and refused to buy the Pragmatists’ stunt to worm their way into the Directorates. I’ve rarely heard our President speak so forcefully about anything. And both Deputies supported him. They were firm that Kronia has its own procedures that are appropriate to Kronia’s ways, and a few malcontents from Earth have no business coming here trying to change them. It’s not their world too, that owes them any equal voice in its affairs as they claim; it’s ours. If they want to come back to Earth and start their own system here again, that’s up to them.” Gallian peered briefly at the window, grinned, and shrugged. “Well, good luck, I suppose, if that’s what they want to do.” He cast around at the company again. “But it seems that with luck all this Terran-style political nonsense might be over at last, finally, and now we’ll all be able to concentrate on things that are useful.” He punched Keene playfully on a shoulder. “No offense, eh, Lan? I wouldn’t want to belittle your history or revered institutions or anything.”
“Gallian, you don’t have to worry yourself about that,” Keene said. Actually, he was feeling pretty good. It meant that things had gone the way he’d expected. Cavan’s attempt to maneuver him into involvement with the politics instead of focusing on the kind of work that he had always felt to be his true calling had been proved overcautious after all, and Keene was vindicated. The old ways of antagonisms and violence, whether physical, political, or economic, were dead. And the new way that Jon Foy had painted so vividly in Keene’s imagination long ago had become the new reality after all.
* * *
At Joburg, Kurt Zeigler tried to follow while Naarmegen tried with exchanges of words and gestures to piece together from Rakki and the white-headed old man called Yobu, who was miraculously still alive, the story of Rakki and his original group of companions. He had heard the account from Keene and the others of how the Tribe had formed mainly from people drifting in. But he was particularly interested in the group that had come to rule, displacing the original occupants of the place.
They were sitting under a thatched awning by the pool cleared in the creek, since Zeigler didn’t like the smells, bugs, and closed-in feeling inside the huts. Some of the women who had been washing skins and recognizable remnants of clothing still watched the strangers with a fear that hadn’t gone completely away, some with children clinging to them, equally wide-eyed and awed. Zeigler tried to ignore them. He would have preferred not to have to rely on academics or scientists to translate, because he suspected their ideological tendencies and considered them naive. But he was stuck with Naarmegen for the time being. He wouldn’t want him to be involved later, when more serious business might need to be addressed.
“Rakki and Yobu, and it sounds like five others, including Calina”—that was the name of Rakki’s fair-skinned woman—”came from another clan, or whatever, who live in some caves to the east,” Naarmegen said. “From the sound of it, there were a lot more of them than here.”
“So there are other groups too,” Zeigler said. That was interesting.
“Seems like it.”
“How far to the east?”
“I can’t make it out, but it sounds like a long way. They wandered around for a long time before they found this place.”
“Not very hospitable,” Zeigler remarked. East was the inland direction, where the river that flowed west and then south around the plateau came from—a desolation of earthquake-shattered mountains, volcanos, lava flows, and swamps.
“They’re a tough bunch,” Naarmegen said.
Zeigler looked Rakki up and down again. His body seemed youthful in some ways, yet it was scarred and muscled like a veteran gladiator’s. His face was barely able to support a beard, but at the same time lined and hardened. The eyes were cruel, alert, cunning—but not unintelligent. He looked back at Zeigler with an unbending stare that seemed to say, So what of your machines and your knowledge of many things? When it comes to the things that make the measure of a man, I, Rakki, can hold my own with the best of you.