Doyle Phoebe Heejanus
When Phoebe spotted Kanpa's air-liner rolling toward the terminal, she clambered out of her
patrolcraft, stretched, and squinted at the cloudless sky. Anu and En-ki ruled the western half,
their glower backing off from the scorcher of a day already delivered. Scattered about that sky
like shards of skull, three moons — crescents of Kistiakowsky, Rabi, and Teller — seemed to echo
the heat, however faintly.
Out on the landing range, packed earth shimmered, as though relaxing after the recent landing.
Here, on the apron, the short and wide passenger aircraft squealed to a halt, sighed as it squatted
on the ground, and noisily lifted its sides to let out dozens of chattering passengers. Phoebe
waded into them.
She could have stayed airborne, scanning the travelers as they scattered on both sides of the
air-liner. She could have waited near the terminal entrance, vetting the two-legged herd. But she
preferred to march, to cut a swath, to make a difference in people's lives, even if it was a
meaningless sidestep.
There, his tuft of black hair glistened. The rest of his back, shoulders and torso, stood out
clearly among the smudges of other people. He carried his suitcase without any sign of wheels or
other robotic pretensions. "Kanpa!" she called.
He wheeled around. "Phoebe!" He smiled, that one corner of his mouth rising higher than the
other.
Delight whisked through her, like a quick brush of fingertips over her nape.
He started toward her. His unlined face appeared wan, though freshly scrubbed, under the soft sway
of his hair. Compared to their last meeting, he looked refreshed. His round, dark eyes seemed
receptive, though wariness rose in them as he approached.
A tang of nervousness drifted through her, too. Glad she'd rehearsed a greeting, Phoebe said,
"Congratulations on getting the proposal through the mountain gauntlet relatively unscathed and in
record time."
"Thank you. Nobody seemed to care much. As soon as they recognized it as being on Har Norma's
special list, they tapped approval and routed it on. I don't think I got seven questions — most
of them from Har Norma herself — through the whole cycle, and no objections. Everybody there
seemed, well, pre-occupied."
"Fates know that I wouldn't have had time to work it. How about a ride?" Too aware of
herself, Phoebe gestured toward her craft.
Kanpa took a moment, searching her face, then thinking about what he saw there, before he nodded.
She smiled her pleasure while relief sighed silently within her — and left a hint of that previous
delight, like a gentle hand lingering on her back.
They turned together and broke loose of the dwindling crowd. After a few quietly awkward steps,
Phoebe asked, "Have you eaten?"
"Hai. On the plane. Indio Viejo."
"That's hard to keep fresh." What a marvelously everyday topic.
"They did pretty well, though. More a soup than a stew, brown rice, green beans, masa to thicken
it some. Of course, no traditional green iguana. I think it was soya curd instead. How about
you?"
"I packed something, ate it on the way over. Cold idlis. Green júzi, not as sweet as ripe, but I
found it refreshing."
He nodded with interest, but didn't keep the conversation going.
More serious words rose in Phoebe. She gave them voice. "It's been a rough five days since you
left. Rough on the direvnya. Rough on the combine. Rough on me."
"Tell me."
"Our dreamsticks failed. Permanent endoware collapse. The day you left." She hadn't put it that
way before; paranoia reared up at the coincidence, shot words out of her mouth. "You didn't have
anything to do with it, did you?" Startled, contrite, she tried a laugh to cover up.
He crinkled his brow softly in confusion, then hardened it as he said very seriously, "No."
She shooed the topic away. "Of course not," she said and looked into the deep sky for words. None
appeared.
"Tell me," Kanpa said again.
That phantom caress feathered her nape. Phoebe smiled appreciation at Kanpa, then with words and
gestures, she profiled the past. Her early-morning nightmare glimmered behind the memories: the
Herald of Pandaemonium reeked; ghosts wailed; she blamed herself.
"Die Gastarbeiter?" he asked.
"Residents, too." A lament rose within her. She squelched it, then with a glance at Kanpa,
released it anyway. Nice to have someone to be open with. "They seem to make progress, then
bang! Something happens and they're at each other again."
"They shouldn't do that. They've been taught otherwise. Our culture encourages change,
assimilation, tolerance."
"Old-fashioned human nature doesn't," Phoebe reminded him as they neared her craft. "I guess it's
still with us." Too soon, zhuhndí had crept back into her mind. The past few moments, an oasis in
the withering desert of her life, fled before reality's sere countenance.
Reluctantly, she opened the patrolcraft's transparent door. A Risk-of-Death Alarm swarmed over
her, trailed by Officer-Down tympani.
"How many?" she demanded.
"Three," it answered.
Three anshin dead! What happened to one at a time? "How long?"
"Three-hundred twelve seconds."
"Gut it!" she muttered and reached out to haul herself inside. She had to get there.
Someone tapped her shoulder.
"Stuff it!" she spat and glanced around.
Backing off, Kanpa pointed toward the terminal and turned after his finger.
Phoebe's heart punched her ribs. The phantom fingertips had stopped their slight work elsewhere.
"No!" She shot out a hand. "Get in!" When he hesitated, she stepped aside and beckoned
urgently. "Forget what I was just thinking." Desperate, she searched his face for the right thing
to say. "Please. Habits die hard, particularly when I'm tired."
Kanpa twitched through a couple of expressions himself, then a smile flickering, jumped inside.
She followed and told the craft. "Let's go! Minimum time to arrival. Maximum maneuvers." It
pivoted toward the landing range even as it buttoned itself up with small pops and clicks.
Vibrations, heard and felt, told of its changing shape.
Phoebe fastened her safety harness, checked his, then added, "You'll stay in the craft, of
course."
With hands up in surrender, Kanpa grinned wryly. "Where would I go?"
The patrolcraft lurched forward. Phoebe scooped up her headset and settled its spouts before her
eyes. The craft leapt from the earth and veered into a new heading immediately. Phoebe suddenly
felt her insides as they took the turn a little after the rest of her.
A few seconds' lurch, then she could demand, "Now tell me what's going on?"
Only the Alarm panel appeared with the annotation "Community Tactician On-Site." No
Response-Pattern panels showed.
Desperate for data, Phoebe shouted, "Show me!"
A fluorescent-yellow circle highlighted the southern horizon. They were too low to see well, but
the names of communities in that direction fled through Phoebe's mind: Uyttebrouck, Tarita,
Sungaipenuh — the new Rendezvous Campus!
"What's there?" Kanpa asked about the circle.
"Not ... sure ... yet," Phoebe grunted as the craft wove through a string of four-story buildings
in Uyttebrouck.
"Right," he replied in kind, teeth locked together.
Then they were clear, a straight shot across the arboreta and greenhouses of Tarita. Off to the
right, fey-banyan clothed the north and northwest with its rumpled, fuzzy crown. The craft added
speed, and soon a wide, slow, and muddy stripe rolled down out of the fey-banyan filling the
western horizon: the Missouri River. A moment later, another river, the Usuthu, appeared to frame
the campus site, upstream of their confluence. More direvnya held back the southern fey-banyan.
On top of all that green cut by the rivers, the yellow circle caught on the rough triangle and drew
nearer.
Her fear realized, Phoebe turned to her headset and called for magnification. Tall, old trees,
rare respites from the fey-banyan that otherwise filled the horizon, trooped across chains of
meadows, their wild grasses teaming with crews sent out by the Rendezvous Cooperative. Runs of
flowers streaked the active scene with shades of purple that would have blessed even the most
pretentious crowned heads on the whole planet of Regency.
The crews were finishing their third day of exploring the site and its potential as grounds for
their future buildings. They ambled through a process as old as human settlement on Yeibichai, a
process wherein people came to know a section of land with its inherent strengths and foibles and
to respect the lifeforms that already called it home. The application of Pattern Language followed
this intimate and thorough introduction.
Three nearly empty circles — Incident Sites — soon made themselves conspicuous. Each contained
blue-gray anshin, three or four trolling with clue-tek, their growing shadows slashing at their
feet, plus another one, just a glyph, lying still and shadowless.
One Site, though, accommodated another figure, in dawn-gray, motionless in her supervision. Line
Roca Coxbaroness, Sungaipenuh Community Tactician. On-site, present, but not interfering with the
job-at-hand, just like Phoebe. Probably racked with guilt, second-guesses, and mental drafts of
procedural changes to keep this from happening again — just like Phoebe.
Phoebe decided the situation required a can-feel. She hung up her headset, then directed her
patrolcraft toward Roca. After it banked, stunted, and planted itself in an open space nearby, she
popped her door open and turned to hop out.
"Leave me access, will you?"
"What?" Phoebe twisted back toward Kanpa, almost surprised to see him there. But pleased, very
pleased.
He waved his hand at his surroundings. "I'd like to use your 'station while I'm waiting." His
tone flat, his face open and clear of expression.
Is he mad or just patient? Piling on that personal worry, like a boulder displacing pebbles, fear
swept over her: yes, fear of the terrible damage a hostile could wreak wielding her fiducia, but
worse, fear of anybody sliding into her place in the combine's policyware.
"I'll use my own fiducia," he explained quickly after reading her face — and
apparently, her very thoughts. His mouth twitched lopsided while his eyes twinkled. "Just tell
your craft to let me."
That phantom caress freshened with her pleasure at his understanding. "Access-gear, enable
physical access by Dyr Kanpachiro Nitsta," Phoebe ordered, then waved and turned again to her
duties.
"Yessir," barked a gruff voice she'd never heard before.
Startled, she glanced back at the console, then caught Kanpa's eye and shared a grin with him.
Then she stepped out to face Roca.
