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  Bass headed for third platoon's troop compartment to pass on the message.

  "The Gordon?" Claypoole asked. "Isn't that the frigate we sailed on a couple of years ago?"

  Kerr slapped him lightly on the back of the head. "Fast frigate," he said. Company L had sailed to Elneal on the fast frigate HM3 Gordon. Kerr had nearly died on that operation. His injuries were bad enough that he'd only returned to the company shortly before the mount out to Waygone. "If you live long enough to get some salt on you, you'll sail on a lot of ships more than once."

  It took more than three days standard for the two ships to rendezvous. When the courier was piped aboard, the biggest surprise was that he was a Marine Corps major general; most of them had expected a navy captain or an admiral. Major General Mowooglhi first met privately with Captain Tuit, before having him call in the ship's officers and Gunnery Sergeant Bass. Then he met with the crew of the ship. Finally, resplendent in his officer's scarlets—bloodred, stock-collared tunic over gold trousers—and an impressive array of decorations and medals on his left chest, he entered the troop compartment to meet with the men of third platoon.

  "Attention on deck!" Staff Sergeant Hyakowa shouted as the general ducked through the hatch.

  The Marines, already lined up in compartment formation, snapped to attention.

  Major General Mowooglhi took a step inside the compartment so Bass could follow without bumping into him. His glowering eyes swept across the men, none of whom met his eyes—they were all looking properly straight ahead.

  The general clasped his hands behind his back and slowly walked through the compartment, along the ranks of Marines, looking each of them in the eye. Now and again he asked, "What's your name, Marine?" or, "Where are you from, Marine?" or some other routine question. It was just like a brigadier's inspection in garrison. When he was finished, he returned to stand just inside the hatch. He nodded at Bass, who shut and dogged the hatch. The glower never left his face.

  "All right," he said after a moment's silence. "What happened on Society 437?"

  There was another moment's silence while the Marines wondered what to say and who wanted to be the first to speak up to a general officer. Mowooghli spoke before any of them did.

  "You found a mission that was wiped out by an alien microorganism," he said. "That's all. There were no aliens; there were no pirates; there was no acid. Just microorganisms. It happens, everybody knows that. If anybody asks, that's all you have to tell them. Otherwise, what happened is classified Ultra Secret, Special Access. Everybody who needs to know what really happened already knows. No one else needs to know. Any questions?"

  "Sir?" a nervous voice said.

  "What's your name."

  "Corporal Goudanis, sir."

  "Speak, Corporal."

  "Sir, we lost three men to the skinks, one dead, two who might not be able to return. What do we tell people when they ask about that?"

  "I say again. When people ask you what happened on Society 437, there was an epidemic. Three of your men caught it. One man died, the other two survived but are very ill. They've been taken back to Earth for treatment and study. Any other questions?"

  "Sir." Another voice, not quite as nervous.

  "Your name?"

  "Lance Corporal Chan, sir."

  "Speak, Lance Corporal."

  "Sir, begging the general's pardon, sir, but that's not what happened on Waygone. Even without meaning to, it's likely that sometime, someplace, someone will inadvertently say something that will tell people what we found."

  Major General Mowooglhi considered for a moment, then said, "Does the name ‘Darkside’ mean anything to you?" He continued without waiting for a reply. "Anyone who says anything about what happened on Society 437 will suddenly and summarily find himself on Darkside. I hope that's clear. Are there any other questions?"

  When no one spoke, Mowooghli said, "That is all. A microorganism wiped out the mission on Society 437." He nodded at Bass, who undogged the hatch and opened it for the general.

  After the general left, Bass snarled, "Gather around. Sit." The Marines crowded close and sat on the deck in front of him. "Major General Mowooglhi," he said when the rustling they made getting in place was done, "is Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence, at HQMC. The orders he just delivered came from someone even higher than the Commandant." He paused to let that sink in—who was higher than the Commandant? "Let me repeat that order. When somebody, anybody, asks what happened on Waygone, we tell them it was a bug. That's it. A bug. Nothing more. We change the subject. If they persist, we tell them we don't want to talk about it. If they still persist, we are to report their asses. We cannot tell anyone what really happened. Not your best buddy in the next platoon, not Captain Conorado, not Brigadier Sturgeon, not your wife, girlfriend, mother, or brother. No one."

  He shook his head. "With what happened on Waygone classified the way it is, we're lucky we aren't on our way to Darkside right now." He paused to let that sink in. "Some of you may remember from your European History studies a place called Devil's Island. Darkside is like that, but less well known, and harder to escape from. Now think about that. Think about it real hard before you come up with any more questions. And remember, nothing out of the ordinary happened on Waygone. It was a bug."

  There was a moment of silence as the Marines digested what had just happened, then a voice piped up.

  "Gunny, Mr. Baccacio and what's her name, that woman. We already let them loose on New Cobh. Aren't they a threat to tell?"

  Bass looked at Claypoole and considered the question and how to answer it. Then he knew and shook his head. "I don't think they're any threat at all. They know that if they say anything to anybody about aliens, they'll have to explain about pirates and how they know. Then they'd find themselves tried as pirates facing a long prison sentence, maybe even execution. They won't talk; it's too dangerous for them."

  Abruptly, Charlie Bass spun about and opened the hatch. He left.

  They were quiet for a long time before they stood and drifted off in twos and threes to murmur among themselves. Hyakowa followed Bass. As platoon sergeant, the only person he could talk to about the situation was the platoon commander, and he badly needed to talk to someone.

  Kerr shook himself. He had accumulated two things that were almost impossible to live with. First was the fear he carried after nearly being killed on Elneal. Then there was the absolute prohibition against saying anything about one of the most significant things to happen to humanity since the invention of fire. He was strong and he was experienced, yet the two things were very difficult, almost impossible, for him to carry. He wondered how the junior men, Marines with neither his strength nor experience, would manage to keep silent about Waygone for their entire lives. He wondered if they would all eventually find themselves on Darkside.

  He stood. "Let's get back to the party. Wouldn't want the entire platoon out looking for us." He looked at the others. "Unless someone knows where there are five women who'd just love our company for the rest of the weekend."

  "I know where there's two," MacIlargie said.

  "Not enough. Let's go back to the party."

  For a long time, Kerr thought, the platoon has to stick together. None of us can go off on our own. We need one another's support so no one slips and finds himself on Darkside.

  Chapter 4

  The Philosopher

  Waakakaa the Philosopher squatted on his high perch, idly pecking lice from beneath his shawl. He cocked his head, studying the eyestretcher mounted in front of the low perch. It was a wondrous thing, the eyestretcher, for a philosopher who desired to understand the nature and meaning of the glitterers that adorned the night sky. Those glitterers meant nothing to most people because few were still awake when they appeared in the darkening sky, or yet awake before they vanished in the sky of dawn. The moon, so far as most people knew or cared, was but a ghost that sometimes was visible in the morning or evening sky. Yet, through the ages, a few people were awake d
uring the long hours when Aaaah made his way unseen from the west to the east to make the sky bright once more. The few were mostly those charged with protecting the sleepers from the night-hunters that sometimes preyed on them. A very few were Philosophers. Philosophers wondered about everything, but there were not many of them, and most Philosophers wondered little about Aaaah-lit matters. Only a few among them ever remained awake during the dark to observe and wonder about the glitterers.

  Over the ages, the few Philosophers who did wonder had mapped the glitterers of the dark, seen patterns in their scattering, and given the patterns names. Six stickles written by ancient Philosophers formed the core of the library of Waakakaa the Philosopher. He had spent many years studying those stickles, as well as the few more he had access to in the university library when he was a student, and he knew how thinking about the glitterers had changed over the ages. From the stickles and his own observations, he knew that the glitterers were constant in number and position—save for the few wanderers whose odd paths were well mapped—even though different Philosophers grouped the glitterers into different patterns with different names. There were other glitterers, of course. Almost every dark, glitterers came from nowhere to streak across the dark and die. Then there were the infrequent strange, tailed glitterers that moved across the dark over a period of months, growing then shrinking, and then were gone.

  Many Philosophers guessed about the nature of the glitterers, but rarely did any two Philosophers agree. The glitterers remained then as they had always—a mystery to those few who saw them and wondered.

  There was one exception to the constancy of number, position, and type—the New Glitterer. When Waakakaa was but a fledgling and not yet concerned with the glitterers, a new one was seen. Then, in his youth, Waakakaa didn't have a stickle of his own that told of the coming of the New Glitterer, but he had journeyed to the University at Rhaachtown to study its library's stickles, which told of it. At first it was the smallest speck in the dark, visible only to the sharpest-eyed Philosophers. It grew over a period of darks until it was visible as one of the brightest glitterers. During its time of growth it had a tail. Then it stopped growing and its tail died. It settled itself in the pattern of the High Tree, near the split in the bole, and remained there.

  There were several oddities about the New Glitterer. It was the first glitterer that jittered slowly in position, from time to time drifting slightly and then abruptly moving back into place. When it suddenly returned to its place, it seemed to grow slightly until it resettled. Infrequently, once or twice a year, small, tailed glitterers came to it, vanished for a period of nights, then left it.

  Altogether, the New Glitterer was very strange. So recently, when Waakakaa heard of another Philosopher who had invented a machine to see at a distance, he journeyed to far Zheekeech to visit him and learn of his invention.

  Kcoock the Philosopher had his tree constructed at the top of a cliff overlooking a great sea. Waakakaa the Philosopher briefly wondered at the gray, pounding waves that shattered against the foot of the cliff and sometimes sprayed foam all the way to Kcoock's tree. But Waakakaa's wondering interest was about the darkness glitterers, so he left the wondering about the gray sea to Kcoock.

  Kcoock the Philosopher believed that the world was round, like a ball, and had spent his life in an attempt to learn the size of that ball. His library contained stickles from all the known world, ranging from the southernmost principalities to exploratory journeys to the far North, as well as the farthest East. The stickles told Kcoock the length of time Aaaah took to traverse the sky. During the winter months, Aaaah sped briefly across the sky, as though hurrying to get in out of the cold. During the summer months, he traveled more sedately, and made a longer day. In far Zheekeech, where winters were longer and colder, Aaaah sped more rapidly across the winter sky, and lingered longer during the summer. Also, the stickles that told of the farthest South said that Aaaah traveled across the northern sky rather than the southern. All of this held sublime meaning for Kcoock the Philosopher. So did the fact that wild fliers seemed to sink into the sea at its farthest edge, even though their manner of movement was that of flying or gliding, rather than landing.

  For many years Kcoock had taken measurements of the wild fliers and determined from those measurements how far away the edge of the sea was. Using all of his knowledge, he constructed a marvelous ball on which he plotted all the lands of the world that were known to him. Most of the globe was devoid of lands. Kcoock believed his measurements were wrong, that the earth could not be mostly void of land. So he desired to refine his measurements. But he was aging and his eyes grew weak, so he could no longer see the wild fliers as they dropped into the edge of the sea. Thus, Kcoock constructed a device that allowed his weakened eyes to see to the edge of the sea, so he might continue his measurements.

  Waakakaa knew as soon as he looked through the eyestretcher that it would be of immeasurable aid to him in studying the night glitterers. Indeed, he spent several nights gazing through it while Kcoock slept. At length he knew he must return to his own tree and construct his own eyestretcher. Kcoock instructed him on how to refine crystal shards and a length of reedtree trunk to build an eyestretcher.

  Back at his own tree, constructing the eyestretcher took far longer than Waakakaa had expected. The refinement and placement of the crystals was far more precise than he had imagined from what Kcoock the Philosopher had told him. Also, experiment taught him that eyestretching during the day was different from eyestretching during the dark. He experimented again and again before he finally managed to construct an eyestretcher that let him see the glitterers of the dark as well as Kcoock's eyestretcher had.

  The view gradually came to disappoint him.

  The glitterers were all points of light the same as he had seen them without the eyestretcher. To be sure, he saw far more of them than he ever had before, but they were still mere points that told him nothing about their nature or purpose. During the darks when the moon shined so bright as to blot out many of the glitterers, he gazed on it. He saw what could only be mountain ranges, plains, and seas, even though they were all white and gray and black instead of green and brown and blue. But the moon wasn't what interested him; he wondered about the glitterers.

  He continued to experiment with eyestretchers, determined to construct one that would tell him more about the glitterers in the dark. Even though he made eyestretchers that showed him smaller and smaller mountains on the moon and revealed its rivers to him, the glitterers remained mere points of colored light. Until tonight.

  Tonight he turned his eyestretcher on the New Glitterer. What he saw made him wonder more than he had ever wondered before. Unlike the other glitterers in the dark, the New Glitterer wasn't a mere point of light, it showed a disk.

  The disk was small, far smaller than the moon seen with the naked eye, and featureless. But Waakakaa saw something on it that no one had seen before, and he wondered what it meant. He knew it had to mean something; perhaps it held the knowledge of all the other glitterers.

  It happened that he had looked upon the New Glitterer during the time it grew brighter and moved from its drift back to its place near the split in the bole of the pattern of the High Tree. Waakakaa saw, then, that the reason the New Glitterer was brighter during its time of movement was small flames that jetted from the side of it opposite its direction of drift. What did this mean?

  He hopped off the high perch and returned to the low perch. He bent his neck to hold his eye against the cupped crystal at the bottom end of the reedtree section. Perhaps like Kcoock the Philosopher, who had spent his life measuring wild fliers when they dropped into the edge of the sea, and in constructing his marvelous globe, he too would spend the rest of his life studying the New Glitterer before he came to an answer. If he ever found an answer.

  Waakakaa the Philosopher studied the New Glitterer for several years before he published his preliminary findings in a stickle so small it was hardly noticed by other P
hilosophers. But after a time the small stickle came to the attention of the Dean of the School of Philosophy at the University at Rhaachtown. Dean Ouoop read the stickle with growing interest, then called in his school's chief accountant and instructed him to find money in the budget to accommodate a Visiting Philosopher, including all of his travel expenses, lodging, food, and a healthy honorarium. The chief accountant grumbled over the expenditure, as is the nature of chief accountants, and went about shifting budget numbers to locate the necessary funds. Dean Ouoop then dispatched a messenger to Waakakaa.

  The Nomads

  Graakaak, High Chief of the Cheereek, perched in a council of war. Lined up before him on a lower perch were Chief of Staff Oouhoouh, Captain of the Guards Cheerpt, Chief Councilor Tschaah, and Head of Scouts Kkaacgh.

  "Say again what you found, Head of Scouts," Graakaak said.

  Kkaacgh resisted an urge to preen. It wasn't often someone of his perching was called upon to brief the likes of the Chief of Staff and the Chief Councilor. And to think he was to speak to them before even the Captain of the Guards! Kkaacgh puffed his chest and stretched his neck up to its full length and spoke toward the ceiling.

  "High Chief, three foraging rides to the west, my scouts found an encampment of Aawk-vermin hunters numbering about fifty. They seemed to be unaware or uncaring that they encroached upon Cheereek hunting lands."

  "How do you know it is a hunting party and not a war party?" demanded Oouhoouh, exposing his throat and other soft parts to Graakaak.

  "Honored Chief of Staff, they carried bows and stickers. They carried shields, but did not wear armor or war helmets."

  "Why do you believe they were wandering hunters and not forerunners for a camp?" Tschaah didn't bother to expose his vulnerability to the High Chief when he spoke. He had been Chief Councilor to Graakaak's father and was too old to be any physical threat.