Caliban

Alvar Kresh frowned in confusion. Given the speed with which she had arrived at the scene, that would have to mean she knew about the attack almost before the maintenance robot called in to report it. How had she found out? “I see. I must admit that she rather gave the impression that it was your idea.”

“Definitely not. As for calling her off, as you put it-I’m afraid the political situation is just too damned delicate. I’m very sorry, but I’ll have to ask you to endure her interference. I think you’ll understand why after you see what I brought you here to see.”

The Governor gestured toward a rather severe-looking chair in the middle of the room. Alvar sat, facing the empty center of the room. Donald followed a step or two behind and stood behind Alvar’s chair. Grieg took a seat himself at a control console that faced Alvar’s chair. That was it, Alvar realized. He looked around the big room and confirmed his suspicion. No robot. The Governor had no robot in attendance in his own private office. Now,there was a scandalous tidbit.No robot. Fredda Leving was one thing, but the Governor himself? Even if the politics of the moment had been calm and settled, it would have been titillating news, as if Grieg had gone out in public without his pants. With the Settlers so much in evidence, it was downright unpatriotic.

But this was not the moment to bring any such thing up ‘with the Governor. Maybe he had seen that lecture of Leving’s-or maybe he knew something more. But Grieg was bent over the control unit, concentrating on it.Best to pay attention, Alvar told himself.

“This is a simglobe unit,” the Governor said, a bit absently, concentrating on the controls in front of him. “You may have seen one before, or seen a recorded playback from a simulation run on one. But I doubt you have seen one like this. In fact, I am certain of it. It’ s a Settler model, much more sophisticated than our own units. It’s a gift from Tonya Welton-and before you can get suspicious ofthat, it was quite thoroughly tested by our own people, andprogrammed by our people. It has not been rigged in any way.”

“So what will it show me?” Alvar asked.

The Governor finished adjusting the controls and looked up at his guest, his face suddenly grim. “The future,” he answered in a flat, emotionless voice that put a chill in Alvar’s spine.

The windows made themselves opaque, and the room’s lights faded away into darkness. After a moment, a vague, dimly lit ball of light came into existence in the middle of the air between Alvar and Grieg. It quickly came into sharper and brighter focus, to become recognizably the globe of Inferno. Alvar found he was drawing in his breath sharply in spite of himself. There are few sights as beautiful to the human eye as a living world seen from space. Inferno was heart-stoppingly lovely, a blue-white gem gleaming in the void.

It was in half-phase from Alvar’s point of view, the terminator slicing neatly through the great equatorial island of Purgatory. Nearly all the southern hemisphere of Inferno was water, though there had been arid lowlands before the terraforming projects gave this world its seas.

The northern third of the world was given over to a single great landmass, the continent of Terra Grande. Even in summer, the polar regions of Terra Grande sported an impressive ice cap. In the winter months the ice and snow could reach halfway down to the sea…

Just north of Purgatory, a huge, semicircular chunk was neatly sliced out of the southern coast of Terra Grande, the visible scar of an asteroid impact some few million years ago. Hidden by the water, the arc of the landward edge of the crater extended out into the sea, forming a circular crater. Purgatory was actually the central promontory of the half -submerged crater. The huge water-filled crater was called, quite simply, the Great Bay.

Clouds and storm-whirls knotted and twisted about the southern seas, with the greens and browns and yellows of the sprawling northern continent half-hidden beneath their own cloud cover. Dots of lightning flickered in the midst of storms in the northwestern mountains, while the eastern edge of the Great Bay was cloudless in the morning light, dazzlingly bright, the coastal deserts gleaming in the sun, the greenswards of the forests and pastures beyond a darker, richer green.

A bit farther south and west along the coast of the bay, Alvar could just pick out the lights of Hades, a small, faint, glowing light in the predawn darkness.