The Spheres of Heaven

by Charles Sheffield

  "The pinnace could hold three. They often do."

  Danny was standing up. Chrissie went across to him, looped one arm in his and the other in Tarbush Hanson's, and led them toward the door. "Say it all again, Danny. Maybe you can talk the Tarb and me into your coming with us."

  When they were outside the recreation hall Danny Casement stopped and stared at Chrissie with suspicion. "Why do you want to talk out here? Chan and Deb need to hear anything we agree to. Do you really mean there's a chance I can convince you?"

  "Not in a million years. Sorry, Danny, but it will be just the Tarb and me in the pinnace." Chrissie took his hand in hers. "You're a big success with women, I know that. But sometimes I wonder how, because you can be as dense as Pipe-Rilla shielding."

  "I don't understand."

  "I know you don't. Don't feel too bad, though, because Tarb is no better." Chrissie nodded her head toward the closed door of the recreation hall. "Back there, couldn't you tell that Chan and Deb were just itching for us to leave? Couldn't you see that things have changed between them?"

  "She wasn't trying to kill him, if that's what you mean. But look, we had to discuss where we are and what comes next."

  "We finished with all that half an hour ago. Those two want to talk—but not about here and now. And not with us."

  Danny Casement and Tarbush Hanson stared at each other. Tarbush, who had said not a word for the past three hours, slowly nodded and spoke. "I think she's right, man. They got serious catching up to do. Twenty years of it."

  Danny walked across the room to one of the observation ports that studded the side of the Hero's Return. He stared out. The sea lacked the abyssal black of ocean depths, and an eye adjusted to the darkness could make out an occasional glint of phosphorescence.

  "Twenty years," he said at last. "I guess it really has been that long. It is going to take a while."

  Somewhere above them, far along the ship's side, a glare of orange fire threw the sea and the seabed into sharp relief. The three at the port saw startled sea-creatures darting away and felt the plates of the Hero's Return shudder beneath their feet. They heard a roar like a wounded sea-monster. In seconds the fiery light came from above, rapidly dimming. Within half a minute the darkness returned.

  "Rocket launch," Danny said into a new and uneasy silence. "One of the orbitals is on the way. It must be getting calmer up on the surface." He turned away from the port. "You're right, Tarb, catching up is going to take a while. Let's hope they—and we—live long enough to see it happen."

  20: MEET THE MALACOSTRACANS

  Friday Indigo could not move a muscle.

  Not even eye muscles. He was lying on his left side on some kind of iron-hard table, low and sloping, and he could see only in one direction. Out-of-focus black objects moved jerkily in front of him against a dull gray background. He could not gauge their size, but the fuzzy outlines had the shape of the creatures who had gunned him down on the shore.

  Gunned him down; paralyzed him; but not taken away the capacity to feel pain. He hurt. His head ached, a knife blade was in his left knee, and the side that he was lying on sent jolts of agony up and down his body each time he took a breath.

  At least he could breathe. How was that possible, when no amount of effort would move arms, legs, and head a millimeter?

  He could also hear. The clicking and chattering was still going on, louder than before and with new sounds added to it. Suddenly he realized that the extra noises were coming from the translation unit attached to his own belt.

  He concentrated on that. It was gibberish, hoots and whistles and obscene gurgles. But then the occasional word started to emerge. "Water. Bubble, burble, splutter, click. Air." A sequence of fizzing sounds, like gas escaping from a bottle. "Live—a-live—alive—alive." And then, after a suite of musical buzzes from the unit, "Mala-costra-cans."

  The translator was a piece of junk, just like the other one. If ever he got back to the solar system he was going to sauté the liver of the crooked swine who had sold it to him.

  The unit babbled on. He had to stop listening, because suddenly his tongue and throat had a column of fire ants walking up and down on them.

  He coughed, swallowed, and almost fainted with pain. A voice from the translation unit said, "Malacostracans." Then, "Air—breath. Wake. It live."

  "You rotten bastards." He could speak! But what he had said wouldn't do him much good, even if the translator did work. "Greetings, alien strangers." Every word was agony. Keep it short. "I—Friday Indigo—captain of the Mood Indigo—come in friendship."

  The muscles that controlled the lenses of his eyes were coming back to life. His eyeballs were on fire, but he could focus. He counted half a dozen creatures over by the wall. There was some variation in size, but the basic body plan was constant: a broad, blue-black carapace, held close to horizontal; ten supporting legs, each one with a pouch attached to its upper end; at what he assumed was the front, two pairs of formidable front claws surrounded by mobile bristles like thin fingers; stalked eyes positioned high on the body, above a trio of fringed slits. "Ugly"didn't even begin to describe them.

  The translator hummed and said, It live. It wake.

  Were they deaf, or just plain stupid? "Did you hear me? My name is Friday Indigo, and I am the owner and captain of the space-going yacht, Mood Indigo. I come to you in friendship."

  "Fridayindigo. Fridayindigo. It live. S-s-speak. Us—" a pause and a fart-like groan from the translator "—us Malacostracans."

  What was it with the "malacostracans" bit? That was the third time the machine had said the same nonsense word.

  Maybe the key to getting something sensible was to talk more, and to make the Indigoans talk back. "Hello. My name is Friday Indigo, and I have come here from another star system. I am the captain of a starship, the Mood Indigo. I am the representative of all humans, and of all other intelligent species who are members of the Stellar Group. I am a new arrival to your world, and I would like to compare your civilization with ours."

  While Friday spoke he was taking a first hard look at his surroundings. Perhaps "civilization" was the wrong word. By any standards, the place he had been brought to was a dump.

  He was lying on the sloping table with his head slightly lower than his feet, at the upper end of a chamber that was also sloping. Maybe twenty meters long and half that across, it was lit by cylindrical wall lamps of a sickly yellow-green. It was, in fact, not so much a room as a pool or tank. The creatures nearest to Friday stood in water only a few inches deep, but down at the far end he saw four more of them, all half-submerged and sloshing around. With its hundred-percent humidity, deadly chill, dank walls and ceiling of muddy gray, this wasn't a place where anyone in his right mind would stay for more than a minute.

  Friday lifted his head, realizing as he did so that part of his discomfort came from the fact that he was still in his suit with his cheek resting on the hard edge of the open helmet. He worked his jaw from side to side and said, "Is the translator getting anything I've said across to you? It's doing a lousy job sending stuff this way—all I've received so far is about five words. Can you hear me? Do you understand me?"

  The translator was certainly doing something. As Friday spoke, it produced a simultaneous string of stuttering clicks and squawks. Two of the Indigoans splashed their way closer to the table and leaned over it with waving eyestalks. Their interest seemed to be not in Friday, but in the translator unit at his waist.

  "Hell-o!" He lifted his right arm and waved feebly. "You down there. I'm up here—that's just a machine that you're staring at. Can you hear me? Can you understand me?"

  One of the creatures slowly turned to face him. The topmost of the three fringed slits began to move.

  "It speak. This the it speak?"

  "If you mean, am I the one who's talking to you and being translated by the machine there, then yes. I am the it who's speaking."

  "It breath air. It live air."

  "That's quite right.
I live in air, and I breathe air. I am"— was it worth the effort? Well, try it one more time—"I am Friday Indigo. I am a human, and so far as I know this is the first contact between your people and mine. This is a very significant meeting. Is there any chance that we could go someplace else if we're going to keep talking? This underwater dungeon gives me the willies."

  "We you same. Live air, live water. Hu-mans you. Malacostracans we."

  "Oh. I get it. Malacostracans. It's your name—what you call yourselves. It's the strangest name I ever heard, I must say, but I'll blame that on the translation unit." Friday tapped his chest with one gloved hand. "I'm Friday Indigo. I'm going to call you Indigoans, for our records. The name of our whole species is humans. My own personal name is Friday Indigo. What's yours?"

  Apparently that was too much, either for the Malacostracan or the translator. Friday heard only a sullen hum.

  "All right, let's leave it for later." He sat up and swung his legs over onto the floor. That produced violent pins and needles from his hips to his toes. He had to sit quiet for a while, cursing horribly and wondering if that too was being translated. He felt for his backpack of supplies, and was relieved to find it there and untouched. If he didn't feel better in a minute he'd take a painkiller. No point in suffering any more.

  "We you go." The Malacostracan waved a vicious-looking pincer in Friday's face. "We you see one big one we."

  "I think I get that. You're just gofers of some kind, so now I'm awake you'll take me to your leader, right? Fine with me. That's the way it should be, because I'm the leader for the humans and I don't want to talk to underlings. Uh-oh. Wait a minute. If you're going out that way, I may need to close my suit."

  The creature had turned away and was scuttling down the incline toward deeper water. When it realized that Friday was not following it paused. The eyestalks reared up over the carapace to stare back at him as he closed the visor of his helmet.

  The translation unit said, "Take shell off, put shell on? Not we."

  "You're dealing with humans now, my friend. There's lots of things that we can do and others can't."

  That was the way to do it, give the aliens an idea of human superiority right at the beginning. But the Indigoan merely waited until Friday was finished, then led the way into deeper water. When it came to a point where the bottom of its carapace was level with the surface, the creature ducked forward and submerged. That confirmed Friday's idea that the Indigoans were equally at home on land or in the sea. But where had they evolved? The bubble men hadn't mentioned them.

  There would be plenty of time for answers to questions like that. First, the translation unit must finish its learning process.

  Friday followed the Indigoan into a narrow tunnel with a semicircular arched ceiling. It was a tight squeeze, but by crouching slightly he could keep his head in the two-foot gap between the surface of the water and the low roof. The lights were all in the main chamber, and he plowed on through increasing gloom. The tunnel was so narrow that there was no possibility of mistaking the way.

  He heard a sound ahead, a faint moaning cry that grew steadily louder. The unit at his waist made no attempt at translation. At the same time the water level went down. He walked a rising incline that led up into deeper darkness. Friday raised his arm above his head, and found that he could no longer touch the ceiling. Also—he spread his arms wide—he could not reach the sides of the corridor. The wailing had become louder and more unearthly. A strong, gusty wind pushed against his chest.

  Confused and unable to see, he paused with water up to his knees. After a few seconds, a light appeared ahead of him. The creature that led the way was holding an oblong lantern high in one of its fore-pincers, while the stalked eyes stared back to make sure that Friday was still there.

  "It's all right." He waved at it. "I'm with you. You can keep going."

  "We go. You follow."

  Friday wondered if the translation unit couldn't work while the Indigoan was under water. A moment later he had other things on his mind. He had a sudden suspicion that they were not inside a room any more, but moving out onto exposed land surface. That wailing sound was from the same wind that pushed at his suited figure. As they came completely out of the water he could feel it swirling about his body. It was the tail end of the storm, raking the night surface of Limbo. From somewhere behind he heard another sound, the distant roar of surf on the shoreline.

  He wondered how far they had carried him. How long had he been unconscious? How long until dawn? And had the Mood Indigo survived its battering by wind and water?

  Well, for every question he had, they must have one about him. The trick was to make sure you got more information than you gave.

  He was still walking, and now there seemed rather more light than the lamp provided. He stopped, leaned back his head, and stared straight up.

  The heavy overcast of the storm had gone, to leave a cloudless night. He opened his visor for the clearest possible view, aware that he would be the first human ever to observe the night sky of Limbo.

  The pre-mission briefings he had received before leaving the solar system had been sketchy, but they had told him pretty much what to expect. The Geyser Swirl was a compact mass of dust and gas in which stars lay strewn at random. The thick dust would scatter starlight, producing a sky in which an overall glow like an aurora was broken by the veils and dark bands of denser absorbing dust.

  Well, so much for what he had been told. He might have guessed it, the briefers were like all briefers: screwed up. The sky here was no gauzy, aurora-like veil. The heavens were filled with glowing globes, many of them so faint that you had to look slightly away to see them at all. They were of different sizes, from faint sky-pearls to swollen balls seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. Even the brighter ones were too dim to possess definite colors, but he imagined that he saw a hint of green in one to the left, a touch of pink in the globe next to it. The sky was full, more globes than dark regions between them.

  Friday heard the clicking of claws and brought his gaze back to ground level. The Indigoan was moving on ahead, up a rocky incline that threw back points of glitter in the light of the lamp. The creature was finding it hard going, scrabbling its way forward and up. Friday bent low and saw a surface so smooth and bare that it seemed to have been scraped clean. What was it Rombelle had said? That there was no life on the surface of the planet. Well, the idiot had been wrong about animal life, but he seemed to be right about the plants. There was no sign of them. What did the Indigoans eat? From the look of them they were more at home in water than on land. Maybe they found their nourishment in the sea. Apparently they thought he was like them, amphibious, if that "we you same, live air, live water" had been translated correctly by the unit.

  The lamp lit a circle only four or five meters across, and the star-globe light was too faint to provide illumination. Everything on the ground beyond the lamp's circle apparently didn't exist. Friday had no choice but to trudge on after the Indigoan and hope the other knew where it was going. The pain of returning circulation was less in his legs, but they felt wobbly and with the continuing uphill walk his lungs were aching.

  "How much farther?" he said at last. "I've got to stop and take a rest if it's going to be much farther. It's easy for you, you're not the one who got shot and knocked unconscious and just woke up."

  That used up what little breath he had left. He paused and panted. He couldn't tell if the Indigoan had understood what came out of the translator, but it too halted and turned. In the lamplight, the creature with its cruel pincers, stalk eyes, and multiple mouth slots seemed like a gigantic and deformed crab.

  The eyestalks waved. "Soon top, top flat like water flat, place you we end."

  That wasn't exactly a model of clarity. "You mean, when we get to the top of this rise, we come to a place that's flat in the same way that the surface of water is flat? And when we get to it, we'll be where we want to be?"

  "We think you speak back we say. Top f
lat like water flat, place for you and we."

  The trouble with the translator was that it had to work both ways to be of any use. He didn't know if the Indigoan's speech had been garbled, and he also didn't know if what he had said in reply was just as garbled in translation. If it was, then no matter what the Indigoan replied he couldn't be sure of the meaning.

  He nodded and took a couple of paces up the hill. "All right. I've had my break, and with any luck I'll find out soon enough where we're heading. And if we don't get there soon, I'll have to take another rest. My legs don't feel right. I'll need a drink too." The creature said nothing. Friday groaned. "All right, then, let's go."

  Actually, he had another piece of evidence that despite all the uncertainties the two of them were somehow communicating. With the light of the Indigoan's lamp no longer in his eyes, some way ahead he could sense more than see a horizontal line, a boundary curve separating black rock from a slightly paler region above. It was too bright to be star-sphere light. Rather, it was just how you would expect things to look if the area beyond the crest of the hill was lit by more of the yellow-green lamps.

  The Indigoan overtook him with a frenzied clatter of claws on smooth rock and led the way up the final slope. Quite sharply, that incline ended on a broad shelf so flat and uniform that it did not appear natural. Friday stopped again, but this time it was not because of shortage of breath.

  What lay ahead had all the markers of a military camp. Maybe thirty meters in front of him stood a tall metal lattice at least three meters high. Bright lamps placed every twenty meters along the top of it threw blue-white searchlights onto the ground inside and out, and the lattice fence ran all the way around a rectangular area maybe two hundred meters long and eighty wide. More significant still, an Indigoan was stationed like a sentry guard at the only two places where Friday could see anything like a gate. It made him wonder, what was being protected, and who was it being protected from?