"We lasted three months until our first murder. That's not a bad record when you think about it."
Neil Moran glanced at the speaker, Dimitri Vlahakos, Inspector General for the Gamma Leporis A-III colony. Neil had been acquainted with Dimitri for more than a century. The man's intense, olive-skinned face dwelled in more than one memory of university days, back when Athens seemed to Neil incredibly far from home. The sang-froid rang false. Dimitri was a man of exuberant Mediterranean gestures and passionate declarations. He was not the sort to shrug and look for the silver lining.
Who was he trying to convince?
Sometimes Neil wanted to reach inside his own skull, peel away brain tissue until he found the implants the Thwaa had left there, and yank them out.
An impossible fantasy. The implants had no nexus. Traces of them inhabited every dendrite and axon in his nervous system, as much a part of his body as, say, potassium ions or oxygen or collagen. All he could do was wish.
Neil gazed out the transport window at the planet. The Neil Moran he had been on Earth was gone. He had no choice but to be the Neil Moran of Gamma Leporis A-III--or Bjornssen, as he supposed he should begin referring to it. If he tried to deny it, reactions like that of Dimitri would remind him of all that had changed.
Observing that his Pollyannaish assessment had fizzled, Dimitri swept his hand across the view of sere peaks, eroded gullies, and slopes dotted with chaparral and scree. "Picturesque, don't you agree? Like your Southwest, where you were born, yes?"
Neil accepted the change of subject. "I don't remember much of that first-hand. The Plague hit when I was only eight. But you're right; it's beautiful. Doesn't quite fit the name. Bjornssen." From twenty-seven lightyears away, the Hershel Telescopic Array had shown a world marked by wind-whipped peninsulas and glacier-flattened islands, much like the homeland of the Danish astronomer who processed the initial interferometric scans. Here in the middle latitudes of the main continent, that geography was not in evidence. The vista offered a solidity and permanence that peat bogs could not aspire to. Neil decided he really needed to get out and about more. He had lingered too long aboard the ark.
The transport crossed above a ridge of crumbled, weathered rock, revealing an oblong valley some fifty kilometers in length. Their course straightened into a gently descending glide toward a mass of ruins.
Dimitri pointed at the vestiges of walls and bridges. "This was quite a city when the Eridanin were here. The region used to get more rain. Signs indicate it may have been a government center of some sort."
"Hence the archaeological interest," Neil said.
"Well, yes, but there's another reason why we started digging here so quickly. Examine, please, the horizon."
Neil scanned to the left and to the right, finding sudden meaning in the configuration of the ridge. "We're in a caldera."
"Earth has at least two bigger than this that I recall," Dimitri continued. "Long Valley in California and Lake Toba on Sumatra. But this is--how do you say it? A whopper?"
"I take it it's not entirely dormant?"
"Not any more. Fresh magma is accumulating. The last eruption was pre-Eridanin--at least thirty thousand years ago--but there is a possibility the whole plug will explode within the decade."
"Won't volcanic activity that potent affect the weather?"
"Nothing we can't deal with. Some cool summers. Some hazy sunsets. We'll be fine as long as we don't found any permanent settlements nearby. The dig can be evacuated with a few hours' notice."
The transport touched down and the pilot released the locks on the passenger compartment. Neil and Dimitri stepped onto a landing field of packed earth. No tarmac or concrete. Neil deliberately noted this. The charter called for Terran presence on this world to remain as tentative as possible until the Thwaa granted permission to colonize fully. What he observed here today, the Thwaa would witness as well. It didn't hurt to be sure humanity received credit for the small ways in which it abided by its promises.
He might have no choice about being a Thwaa tool, but at least he was free to maintain his loyalty to his own culture.
A lean, bony individual in khaki work clothes approached, offering his hand. "Ivan Vereshchagin. I am the director of the team here," he said in English so precise as to be overly formal.
"This is Neil Moran, the, ah, the Thwaa consul." Dimitri winced at the hesitation he inserted into the introduction.
Vereshchagin's youth was as perfectly sustained as that of anyone under the age of two hundred fifty, but he exuded a dour studiousness that implied he was older than either of his visitors. His unkempt aspect reminded Neil of a university professor caught in the waning of middle age. His handshake remained firm, but he failed to hide the eyelid flicker of unease that others suppressed when first meeting Neil. He stared as if expecting Neil to sprout Thwaalike cilia.
"Pleased to meet you," Neil said.
Vereshchagin nodded. Neil waited for him to say something more--"Welcome," perhaps--but the archaeologist managed only to look constipated.
"I hope you managed to get some sleep," Dimitri added as the lull grew awkward.
"A little," Vereshchagin replied.
"I didn't leave here last night until the wee hours," Dimitri explained to Neil. "If I'd known I had to return today to bring you, I would have saved some of the on-site investigation for this morning."
Always the caution, carefully veiled in ingratiating language. Dimitri wanted the Thwaa to know that he hadn't deliberately kept them out of the loop. Neil believed him. Dimitri could not have known the Thwaa wanted to send their native observer until Neil had received the directive and so informed the governor. That summons had not come until the news of the murder, leaked by one of the diggers, raced across the net just before midnight.
"I won't require more than a few hours," Neil assured Vereshchagin. "I just need to check on a handful of the basic aspects of the case first-hand."
"Very well," the director replied. "With what would you like to start?"
"I'll want to see the body."
)
The aliens who control the galaxy have finally permitted the human race to establish its first colony beyond the solar system, on an Earthlike world circling the star Gamma Leporis A. But Homo sapiens is on probation. The settlers have to demonstrate that they are worthy of the lease. Unfortunately, the overlords are so unfathomably alien in their values that the settlers are uncertain what standards of behavior they are being held to. It could be that as little as one error in judgment or lapse of morality will cause the beings to yank back the charter, as they did with the planet's previous tenants, a race known as the Eridanin. In the wake of the colony's first homicide, the question of worthiness is very much on the mind of the investigators-will the murder trigger the end of human expansion to the stars?
