Promised Land by Brian Stableford Page B

tired.
    Better not lean on him, counselled the wind. All kinds of things might happen yet. If this doesn’t come off, the last thing you want is for him to blame you.
    He can’t blame me, I said.
    Just don’t give him the chance, he said. Remember just who has to look after Charlot’s end on the planet, if you ever do get down. He won’t be doing any legwork in the jungle himself, no matter how important this issue is to him.
    That, of course, was true.
    Ah, I said, we’ll never get down there. They aren’t going to fall for the gunboat threat.
    They don’t know any better, he said.
    And he was right about that, too.
    I continued to talk to him, to while away the time, but we didn’t have anything of vital importance to discuss. I was just trying to keep my attention alive against the declining effect of my last stimshot. I didn’t know whether I ought to take another or not. Whether we landed within the hour or were condemned to stay up forever, the chances of getting to sleep soon looked reasonably good.
    The conversation drifted away from the issue at hand to other less memorable and less relevant affairs. The conversation was not unpleasant, but it is perhaps more important to record that it was not purposeful. It was idle chatter, nothing more. That’s some measure of the bonhomie which we’d cultivated of late. The constant stress and strife of the caves of Rhapsody had been left behind in those caves, along with the infernal darkness. It no longer seemed to matter quite so much that the wind was by no means impotent in physical terms. It had seemed a matter of tremendous importance while we’d been in the caves, but it didn’t seem tremendous now. I was coming round to measuring him by what he said and what he did rather than by what he was potentially capable of doing. I was reasonably sure that he posed no meaningful threat to my beloved egocentricity and independence of spirit. There has to come a time when you stop fighting things and learn to live with them. It was getting to be that way with the wind. The transition from one attitude to the other had not been abrupt, but it had been considerable. I was forming the opinion that if the wind was changing me at all, then he was changing me for the better. The wind, of course, had told me so all along, but he was too polite to remind me now.
    At the end of the hour, Commander Hawke came back on to the circuit and told us we could land. He also told us that we could have the full co-operation of the Zodiac crew in following up the matter of the illegal landing of the White Fire and its human cargo.
    On one condition.
    Even that was better than we had expected, from Charlot’s point of view. Instead of only one of us being able to join the search, they would accept two of us. I stress that this was better from Charlot’s point of view. Not from mine. Charlot nominated Eve, and—of course—me.
    Captain Eve. And Crewman Grainger.
    I knew it was going to be a bad trip.

CHAPTER SIX
    If either of us thought that Commander Hawke’s capitulation meant that things were destined to go our way, then we were quickly disillusioned. Under pressure, the children of the Zodiac permitted us to land. Under pressure, they agreed to mount a search for the people landed by the White Fire (the ship itself, of course, had taken off again, and I never expected to hear from her—it’s easy enough to change a name and get new papers). Under pressure, they let us join in. All very nice. We appreciated it. Until we found out what their idea of a full-scale search was.
    There were two of us. There were also two of them. They were called Max and Linda. They hated each other. Linda was a member of the Zodiac crew. She was nominally our liaison officer—to help us in our dealings with the Anacaona. She was supposed to be an anthropologist. She was a nice person, and about as useful as Eve, which wasn’t