Varlik arrived at officers' mess thick-headed and sluggish from the combination of the short Orlanthan diurnal cycle, the army's daybreak reveille, and having gone to bed so late the night before. Before hitting the sack, he'd copied and edited his cube, intercutting his narration, covering not only the T'swa but the Aromanis camp and the heat, with a brief statistical description of Kettle he'd excerpted in the ship's library. It was his first feature on Kettle and the T'swa.
Now, as he stepped into the relative coolness of the mess hall, the pungent smell of fresh-brewed joma met him, along with the different pungency of fried bacon. He'd have liked to take the empty seat at Colonel Voker's table, but the brisk and businesslike pace of eating there warned him away and, at any rate, the media people had their own table assigned here. It might be a breach of etiquette to sit elsewhere uninvited. So instead he crossed to where Konni Wenter and the typically withdrawn-looking Bertol Bakkis sat eating.
A messman in crisp white apron had seen Varlik enter and, tracking him with his eyes, slanted quickly over, stainless steel thermal pitcher in hand, to pour his joma and take his order. Varlik gave it, then unfolded the waiting white cloth napkin onto his lap as the messman left.
"I saw you leave last night," Konni said.
Varlik looked up, noticing Bakkis's opaque gaze on him.
"You did? I'm surprised," Varlik said. "It was close to 19.20 when we left."
"Nineteen-fifteen; I looked. I couldn't get to sleep, so I'd been out walking around to get tired. I saw a car pull up, and five minutes later you left in it."
"Right."
She said nothing then, as if waiting, and he ignored her, testing the scalding joma with a cautious upper lip, deciding that cream was in order, for cooling. If she wanted information, she'd have to be specific.
"Where did you go?" she asked finally as he put down the cream and reached for the sugar.
"Off base." Varlik's eyes moved to Bakkis for a moment; the heavyset cameraman had shifted his attention back to his plate, half cleaned of its eggs and bacon.
"I'd hoped," Konni said, "that we might cooperate here, to some degree at least. It's not as if we're rivals."
She'd hit close to home, and it annoyed Varlik. He finished sweetening his joma before turning his eyes to hers. "I'm afraid I tend to be a loner," he said stiffly.
The messman was approaching with Varlik's breakfast on a large plate, and Varlik gave his attention first to receiving the food, then to opening and buttering a hot roll.
"I suppose you've heard about the T'swa regiments."
The voice as well as the words startled Varlik, and butter knife poised, he turned abruptly to Bakkis. The man had never spoken to him before. "We plan to find out where they keep them," the cameraman went on, "and go out there today. You're welcome to ride with us if you want."
"That's where I was last night," Varlik found himself answering. "I was there when they landed, about thirty miles from here."
"Two regiments, were there?" Bakkis asked.
"Right. Just the way I'd heard back in Landfall."
Bakkis nodded, face still inscrutable. "Do you plan to go back there today?"
"Yes. Matter of fact, I do."
"Be all right to go together, or do you want to go alone?"
Varlik was amazed. He'd thought of Bertol Bakkis as a lump of barely aware flesh, its intelligence pickled in ethanol, operating in some obscure, automatic way along a subconscious thread of journalistic intention. Now the man was talking as casually and intelligently as anyone might, and for the moment it was Konni who sat quietly.
Bakkis had been the icebreaker. While they finished their breakfasts, the three of them talked about the T'swa, about Varlik's brief talk with Colonel Koda, and the invitation to attach himself to Koda's regiment.
"I suppose you got some cubeage of the landing," Bakkis said.
"Some. If you'd like to copy the field cube with your equipment," Varlik found himself saying, "you're welcome to."
"Thanks. I will. And when we get back to our quarters, I'll have Konni interview you on camera. That will make the field shots more meaningful to viewers, and it'll set people up for the feature articles you send."
It made so much sense to Varlik that his earlier guardedness seemed incomprehensible and petty.
After Bakkis had copied parts of his T'swa cube—the landing and the bivouac—and shot Konni's skilled interview, they went to the communications center. On the way, Varlik apologized, not very articulately, for his boorishness, and Konni, for whatever reason, had stiffened at the apology. Bertol's reaction, somewhat amorphous, seemed to say that he hadn't felt aggrieved, but thanks anyway.
The temperature had soared, and sweat had soaked through Varlik's twill shirt; workouts aboard the Quaranth had developed his sweat gland function well beyond the ordinary. After filling out brief forms and labels, they left their packaged cubes with the sergeant there for dispatch to Iryala in the day's message pod. Even by message pod, the sergeant told them, it would take 9.83 standard days for reports to reach Iryala—11.90 Orlanthan days.
From the communications center, it was no more than an eighty-foot walk down a corridor to the information office. At their knock, Trevelos called out to enter, and they did, Varlik holding the door for the other two. Trevelos's almost boyish pleasure of the day before was gone. The expression that met them now was stiff and guarded.
"How can I help you?" he asked.
It was Varlik who answered, "We'd like a vehicle."
Trevelos's expression became stiffer, yet vaguely unhappy. "I'm afraid I can't do that."
Varlik was dumbfounded. "Why? Yesterday you said we could have one or more if we wanted."
Trevelos's discomfort was tangible. "I'm afraid I overspoke myself. If you want to go somewhere, perhaps I can arrange a chauffeured vehicle."
"Okay. We'd like to be taken to the T'swa camp."
Trevelos didn't answer for several seconds. "I'm afraid that's impossible. The T'swa camp is off-limits."
"Off-limits? Why?"
"The T'swa's privacy is to be strictly respected."
"But lieutenant, I was there last night and had a direct invitation from Colonel Koda of the Red Scorpion Regiment to stay with them, to describe them and their training for the Iryalan public. He told me he'd expect me today."
Trevelos actually blushed. "I'm afraid I can't help you with that, Mr. Lormagen. Perhaps something else."
Hormones—something—surged through Varlik's body, with a feeling first of heat, then of internal numbness, incredulity, as he stared at the information officer. Then Bakkis spoke, his tone casual.
"What, specifically, did the general order, lieutenant?"
Varlik's eyes turned to Bakkis's sweaty, somewhat florid face, then to Trevelos again. Bakkis had put his finger on the problem, Varlik was sure: Lamons. But the only result was that Trevelos looked less uncomfortable, as if with a shifting of blame from himself to the general.
"I do not feel I should discuss my orders."
"Of course." Bakkis had taken over, and Varlik was willing, for now, that he should. "We can understand that," Bakkis went on. "In that case, we'd like to see the agricultural operation."
Trevelos brightened. "Certainly. When would you like your car?"
Bakkis looked at Varlik, "Varl?" he said.
"Uh—why not now?" At the moment he didn't care—he had no real interest in the Aromanis farms—but it was an answer.
Trevelos looked almost happily at Bakkis. "I can have a car and driver here in fifteen minutes. And I'll call the farm headquarters so you can have lunch there. Their executive dining room has a marvelous reputation among the general's staff; almost everything they serve is fresh, and the cooks are excellent."
Bakkis asked that they be picked up at their quarters in fifty minutes—half a local hour. After the lieutenant had made arrangements with the motor pool, the three journalists said goodbye and left. When the office door had closed behind them, Bakkis muttered an obscenity, but without heat, and started toward the communications center. "I'm going to dispatch my office and ask them to get this restriction lifted if they can. They were especially interested in the T'swa. Meanwhile, let's keep Trevelos happy and relaxed."
So Iryala Video had also been especially interested in the T'swa. "Messages will take ten days Standard each way," Varlik pointed out, "plus whatever time it takes at the other end to get an order issued—if it gets issued."
They had stopped outside the comm center door. "The next time we see Trevelos," Bakkis said quietly, "I'll tell him we've dispatched our offices for a reversal, and that we appreciate what he's done for us. He'll assume we're content to wait, that we're trusting our offices to take care of things for us. That's the way he'd do it. Maybe that will relax him about our wanting to get to the T'swa. Then, in three or four days, we'll try to get a car without a driver, to hop around and interview some Romblit troops. He's already feeling propitiative, and if he'll go for that, screw the restriction; we'll go see the T'swa."
Varlik wondered if that would work, and if Bakkis actually believed it might. One thing was certain: He'd drastically misjudged this man back on the Quaranth.
The trip to the farm had been more interesting than Varlik had anticipated. The travelways were lined with tall native trees. The headquarters buildings were comfortable, rambling, air-conditioned, and beautifully landscaped, with everything marvelously clean and well-tended. The cuisine was better than anything he'd experienced before. The Romblit personnel there seemed competent and friendly. Security personnel were numerous, well-armed, and relaxed—were paramilitary employees of Technite, Ltd., the firm that had long operated the Orlanthan fief for the Romblit government. The army apparently restricted itself to patrolling the surroundings, leaving the on-farm scene at something like prewar normal.
Remarkably little powered machinery was used in the agricultural operations; hand labor was compellingly cheap, apparently, and probably more precise for many tasks. Even the removal of weeds in large rowcrop fields was done by a line of tall thin workers, the hoes in their hands rising and falling in unison.
The field workers and domestics had given Varlik his first look at sweatbirds. They were a brownish people, slender except for barrel chests, their coarse brown hair straight and almost crested, their flaring eyebrows like tufts of golden-brown feathers that presumably served to divert sweat. And even those who served in the dining room showed little sign of subcutaneous fat. They reminded Varlik of kerkas, the tall wading birds of Iryala; their noses really were relatively long and pointed, and their necks too long as human necks go. Their physical structure seemed designed to maximize the body's surface/mass ratio for dispersing body heat. They were quite different from the husky T'swa, whose phenotype had evolved under considerably heavier gravity.
Varlik had wondered what the local sweatbirds thought of the war; perhaps, he'd told himself, they didn't even know about it, although all the nearby military activity must have told them something was happening somewhere.
After the farm, Bertol and Konni had been ready for a shower, to be followed by editing their field cubes in air-conditioned comfort. Varlik, though, had decided to take care of one final job, and jogged through dusty 120° heat to headquarters. After the aesthetics of the farm, the drab and dusty military base seemed utterly graceless. He knocked at the information officer's door and identified himself, and Lieutenant Trevelos's voice bade him enter.
"How can I help you?" the lieutenant asked when Varlik had entered.
"I'd like to see the Orlanthan briefing. It will give me a much better sense of the overall situation here."
Immediately the lieutenant looked worried, then apologetic. "Mr. Lormagen, I really dislike telling you this . . ."
"But you can't let me see it."
"That's right. You're neither a staff officer nor a command officer."
Varlik nodded slowly. "Well . . . thank you, anyway."
He turned and left, jogging back to his quarters for the postponed shower. While showering, he rehearsed several scenes with General Lamons, none of which, he knew, would ever occur. A couple of them were probably physically impossible. Then he too sat down to play his field cube of the day and record his article. When he'd finished, he had to admit it was good, something that readers would appreciate. But it wasn't what he was here for.
After supper he found out where Colonel Voker was quartered—a one-room hut of poured concrete in officers' country. Varlik stood hesitantly, unsure he should be there, then knocked. The colonel opened the door and scowled out at him.
"What do you want?"
"I seem to be running into brick walls at the information office. I hoped you could advise me. Again."
Voker's surliness softened slightly, and he gestured Varlik in. His quarters, though military, managed, through the prerogatives and resources of a senior officer, to reflect his personality. The windows were curtained. A small and clearly expensive tapestry softened one wall; a burnished wood bookcase with expensively bound books stood against another. The air conditioner held down the interior temperature to a luxurious 85°. Next to a lightly upholstered chair, a book lay open, face down on a small stand, and a red light glowed in an expensive cube player beside it.
"Specifically?" Voker asked.
Varlik told him of the prohibition against being taken to the T'swa camp, and of Trevelos's refusal to let him see the briefing on Orlantha.
"And this Colonel Koda invited you to stay with them?"
Varlik nodded. "Right."
"Huh." Voker gazed reflectively at him, lips slightly pursed, then abruptly grinned—a grin of pleasure tinged with something else. Malice. "So you still want to live with the T'swa. Well, fine. Be at the headquarters entrance at 05.50 hours tomorrow morning. And carry everything you absolutely need on your person, in case you luck out and make it to the T'swa camp—recorder, camera, toothbrush. The minimum. Don't be obvious—no suitcase. From there it's up to you—your wits and your guts. And your luck.
"And as far as the briefing cube is concerned, you got the essential picture from me aboard the Quaranth."
He stepped back to the door and put his hand on the handle. "And I don't mind telling you, I'll be interested in seeing what happens in the morning."
At 16.00 hours, Lieutenant Trevelos, reading a novel on the computer screen in his office, was interrupted by a knock. Irritatedly he cleared the screen before saying, "come in." It was Colonel Voker who opened the door, and Trevelos got quickly to his feet.
"At ease, lieutenant. I just came by to ask a question or two."
Trevelos receded into his chair. "Of course, sir." He looked around. "Would the colonel care to sit?"
Voker waved it off. "The reporter, Varlik Lormagen, and I got to know one another on the Quaranth. I ran into him on my way over here, and asked how he's doing. He told me he's been refused access to the Orlantha briefing. Can you give me the background on that refusal?"
"Yes, sir. Last night Mr. Lormagen went out to the T'swa area, and somehow the general heard about it this morning. It made General Lamons very unhappy, and he made it extremely clear to me that under no conditions was I to allow the media to go there again. He was particularly unhappy about Lormagen, and told me—these are his exact words—'You are not to allow this young fart any special privileges.' " Trevelos shrugged, spreading his hands.
Voker nodded thoughtfully. "I get the picture. Thank you, lieutenant. And have a good evening."
In the corridor, Voker allowed himself a chuckle. The situation was exactly as he'd suspected. In fact, he'd have given odds on it, but it was nice to know with certainty. Tomorrow he'd see just how good, and how lucky, young Lormagen was.