Convergence hu-4

by Charles Sheffield

  Convergence

  ( Heritage Universe - 4 )

  Charles Sheffield

  The discovery of an ancient alien technology known as the Artifacts enables the human race to jump from galaxy to galaxy, but when a strange new Artifact emerges and changes all the other Artifacts, chaos ensues.

  Convergence

  by Charles Sheffield

  Chapter One

  It was a sobering thought: to contemplate a whole world, with all its diverse environments and its swarming life-forms. And then to reflect that you were apparently the only one of those myriad forms who sweated — or needed to.

  Louis Nenda wiped his forehead with a fuzzy piece of cloth, and as a second thought mopped his bare chest and his dripping armpits. Although it wasn’t yet noon in Genizee’s forty-two-hour day, the temperature had to be around a hundred. Humid, hot, and horrible, like the inside of a steam boiler. Nenda looked up, seeking the disk of Genizee’s orange-yellow sun. He couldn’t see it. The annular singularities that shielded the planet were strong today. Louis saw nothing more than a swirl of colors, shifting in patterns that defeated the eye’s attempt to track them.

  A whistling grunt brought his attention back to more mundane concerns. Half-a-dozen Zardalu were dragging a ten-meter cylinder along the flat sandy shore for his inspection. No sign of discomfort in them. The midnight-blue bodies of the land-cephalopods, protected by their waxy outer leather, seemed impervious to either heat or cold.

  The Zardalu paused respectfully, half-a-dozen paces from Louis Nenda, and bent to touch their broad heads to the beach.

  “The Great Silent One found this in one of the interior tunnels.”

  Nenda stared down at the prone figures stretching their tentacles six meters and more along the beach. The leading Zardalu was using the clicks and whistles of the old language, the ancient Zardalu Communion slave talk. It lacked a decent technical vocabulary, but Louis was willing to put up with that. The master-slave relationship was all that mattered.

  “She told you to bring it here?”

  “The Great Silent One indicated that to us. I am sorry, Master, but we are still unable to understand the Great Silent One’s speech.”

  “Atvar H’sial’s not easy to understand. Maybe you’ll catch on one day, when you get a bit smarter.”

  Louis prayed, not for the first time, that this particular day would be a long time coming. If the Zardalu ever really caught on…

  “Do you think, Master, that this might be the missing component?”

  “Could be. Have to study it before I can be sure. Leave it here. Now get back inside, and help the Great Silent One.”

  “Yes, Master. Let us pray that this is indeed the necessary component. For all our sakes.”

  Nenda watched them as they retreated toward one of the holes that led to the interior. They weren’t groveling as much as usual. And that last crack hadn’t sounded quite as subservient as it should. “For all our sakes.” Maybe it was his imagination, but it sounded more like a threat than a prayer.

  Even so, he was glad to see them go. Those huge beaks were big enough to bite him in half. The great tentacles could tear a human limb from limb. Louis had seen it done.

  And some day soon, he might see it done again. Or feel it.

  How long had it been? He squinted up again toward the invisible sun. Nearly two months. He and Atvar H’sial had stalled the Zardalu for all that time, pretending that they had the know-how to take the Indulgence out to space and away from Genizee. When the Zardalu found out that Nenda and Atvar H’sial were as trapped on the planet as they were, it would all be over.

  It wasn’t the ship; he was sure of that. The Indulgence was perfectly spaceworthy. It was those damned annular singularities, the eye-twisting glow that he was peering at now, and the Builder constructs that controlled them. They made space off-limits to anything that started up from the surface of Genizee. How long before the Zardalu latched on to the fact that Louis was as helpless as they were?

  Louis went across to the cylinder that they had dumped on the beach, and sat down on one end of it. He inspected it, bending over with his head tucked down between his knees to examine its hollow inside. An old piece of air circulation ducting, by the look of it. About as able to fly into space as Louis himself.

  The sweat was trickling down his inverted face and into his eyes. Louis straightened up and mopped again with the sodden cloth. The sea, a hundred yards away across the beach, was cool and tempting. Louis would have been in for a dip hours ago, if he hadn’t long since learned of the fanged horrors that swam beneath the calm surface. They made the Zardalu seem tame.

  He might as well head for the tunnel system and see how Atvar H’sial was doing. It would be dark there, and clammy, but it would be cooler.

  Louis eased his way off the air duct and stood for a moment in thought. Something felt a little bit different. What was it? Maybe sitting with his head down had made him dizzy. It sure wasn’t any improvement in the weather. It was hotter than ever. Even the top of his skull felt as though it was burning up.

  He put up a hand to rub at his dark matted hair. He was burning up. His hair felt hot. Maybe he was getting sick. That would be just what he needed, to catch some alien planet’s bug, out in the ass-end of nowhere, where the native drugs and painkillers didn’t work unless you happened to have a beak and blue tentacles.

  Louis removed his hand from his head. As he did so he caught a flicker of movement on the ground in front of him. He stared, blinked, and stared again. He was seeing something there: something that could not be. He was seeing a shadow.

  His own shadow. Louis spun around and stared up. The unshielded sun was visible, bright and glaring. For the first time since he and Atvar H’sial set foot on Genizee, the swirling light of the annular singularities had vanished.

  Louis gazed directly at the marigold sun for at least two seconds — long enough so that when he stopped he saw nothing but dark, pulsing circles. Even before they faded, he was running.

  He had to get to the interior tunnels. He had to find Atvar H’sial, and bring her to the surface before any of the Zardalu saw what had happened and realized its possible significance.

  The sun’s after-images blinded him to what lay ahead. Close to the entrance of the tunnel he ran full tilt into a springy surface that bounced him away onto the sand. Nenda heard a deep grunt. Three jointed limbs reached down and raised him effortlessly to his feet.

  “Louis Nenda, save your energy for the future.” The pheromonal message diffused across to him from Atvar H’sial, with a subtext of concern and warning. “I fear we have troubles ahead.”

  The giant Cecropian set him gently onto the sand. The creature towering over Nenda inclined her white, eyeless head, with its pair of yellow open horns below two six-foot fanlike antennas. Beneath the head was a short neck banded in scarlet-and-white ruffles, leading to the dark-red segments of the underbody. The whole effect, propped up on six jointed bristly limbs, was the stuff of nightmares.

  But not to Louis Nenda. He did not give the Cecropian’s anatomy a second thought. He had seen too many aliens to go by appearances. “Trouble? What kind?” Nenda’s pheromonal augment went into action, even though he was too winded to speak.

  “The interior of Genizee is changing, in ways that I cannot explain.” The pheromonal language of the Cecropian, unlike the slave talk of the Zardalu Communion, possessed degrees of subtlety and shading denied to even the richest of human tongues. Atvar H’sial’s speech included images of collapsing walls, closing tunnels, and vanishing chambers, deep within the planet. “If this continues, our pretence of the need for interior exploration will be destroyed. The Zardalu will demand that we demonstrate to them the powers that we have
so long claimed, and take them to space.”

  “It’s not just the inside that’s changing.” Nenda pointed upward, knowing that the pleated resonator on Atvar H’sial’s chin was bathing him with ultrasonic pulses, and the yellow horns were using the return signal to provide a detailed image. The Cecropian could “see” Louis’s gesture perfectly well — but what she could not see was the vanishing of the annular singularities, and the emergence of the naked sun. No Cecropian could sense light, or other electromagnetic radiation shorter than thermal wavelengths.

  “Up there, At,” Nenda continued. “The singularities have gone. They just vanished, a couple of minutes ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Damned if I know. Or care. But we’ve got to get over to the Indulgence, and take her up.”

  “And if we are returned once more to the surface, as we were before?”

  “Then we’re in deep stuff. But we’re in that anyway if the interior tunnels are closing.”

  “Everywhere. As far as my signals could penetrate, the interior constructions of Genizee are vanishing. It is as though the work of the Builders there never existed.”

  While Atvar H’sial was still speaking, she acted. Without asking for approval from Louis Nenda, she picked him up and curled him tightly in a pair of forelimbs. She went springing away across the surface in long graceful bounds, her vestigial wing cases wide open behind her. Louis had his breath knocked out of him at every leap, but he did not complain. A Cecropian in full flight was much faster than any human.

  The Indulgence lay midway between a twisted thicket of gigantic moss plants and five jutting towers of sandstone that formed homes for the senior Zardalu. Nenda rubbed his aching ribs as Atvar H’sial placed him on the ground — Didn’t she realize her own strength? — and glanced across at the towers. At this time of day most of the Zardalu should be working in the ocean or the interior tunnels. Just his luck, if today they had decided to take a vacation.

  At least the Indulgence was intact. But the ship was useless, as it had been for the past two months. Nenda had checked the engines every day. They were in perfect condition, with ample power. There was just one problem: they refused to carry the ship up from the surface of the planet. Something — the annular singularities themselves, or more likely the Builder constructs who controlled them — had inhibited every attempt at take-off.

  “Quickly, Louis Nenda. This is no time for introspection.”

  It hadn’t been more than two seconds since Atvar H’sial dropped him on the ground with his chest half crushed.

  “Get off my back, At. Gimme time to breathe.” Nenda swung the hatch open. “If the engines don’t work this time, it’ll be the last shot of introspection we’ll ever get.”

  The lift-off sequence had been waiting in the computer for two months. The navigation system was primed and ready. Louis was in the pilot’s seat two seconds after the hatch opened. Unfortunately, the power build-up of the Indulgence’s engines took a minimum of three minutes, and it was far from silent.

  Three minutes. Three minutes of sitting, staring at the screens, wondering when the first head of midnight blue would peer curiously out of one of the towers, or lift from the calm sea.

  “What do we do if the engines don’t work this time, At?” Was that the curling end of a long tentacle, or just a ripple on the blue water?

  “We will chastise the Zardalu, blaming them for the inadequacy of their assistance to us in refurbishing the ship.”

  “Right. Lots of luck.” It was a tentacle. And now a head had broken the surface. The Zardalu were swimming rapidly for shore, four of them, and now half-a-dozen more. They must have felt the vibrations, and known that they came from the engines of the Indulgence.

  Still over a minute to go. Was it time to send Atvar H’sial to man the ship’s weapons system? Maybe they could swing it one more time; persuade the Zardalu that another day or two was all it would need to give them access to space. But that persuasion would have to be done outside the ship, without weapons…

  “Has it occurred to you, Louis Nenda, that if we do achieve orbit, and depart Genizee, we will once again be leaving empty-handed?” Atvar H’sial was crouched by his side, her echolocation vision useless to see what was happening outside the ship. “We did not have the foresight to stock the Indulgence with samples of Builder technology. We do not even have Zardalu trophies. I blame myself for a major lack of foresight.”

  Thirty seconds to go. The ship was vibrating all over as power build-up hit sixty percent. Zardalu were boiling up out of the water and whipping themselves along the shore toward the ship. The nearest was less than forty yards away. Others were appearing from the sandstone towers. And Atvar H’sial was bemoaning the lack of mementoes!

  Nenda gripped the controls, a lot harder than necessary. “At, you can have my share of trophies, every one of ’em. I’ll be glad to get out of here with my ass and hat. Hold on tight. I’m going for a premature lift.”

  The nearest Zardalu was reaching out long tentacles toward the ship. Power was less than seventy-five percent, below the nominal minimum. The Indulgence shuddered at Nenda’s lift-off command and rose three feet off the ground. It hovered for a moment before sliding lazily sideways and down to the soft earth.

  Too soon!

  Forty seconds were recommended between engine power pulses. Nenda managed to wait for a quarter of that, until he heard something slap at the hatch and begin to turn the handle. He gritted his teeth and hit the lift-off sequence again.

  The Indulgence shivered and began a wobbling, drunken ascent. Nenda watched the ground as it drifted past on the viewscreens. They were at six feet — ten feet — still within reach of questing tentacles. The shoreline was approaching. The ship was crabbing sideways, slowly lifting. Engine power was nearing eighty percent.

  “We’re going to make it, At. We’re lifting, and nothing aloft is stopping us.” Nenda glanced at a viewing screen. “Hold on, though. We got a problem. There’s a whole line of Zardalu, right at the edge of the beach. We might be low enough for them to grab us.”

  “What are they doing?”

  Nenda stared hard. He didn’t speak the Zardalu slave tongue all that well, and the body language was even harder to read. But the splayed lower tentacles and the upper two raised high above every Zardalu head, together with the wide-open gaping beaks, were an easy signal.

  “You won’t believe this, At. But they’re cheering.”

  “As they should be. For are we not demonstrating to them that, as promised, we are able to leave the surface of Genizee and go to space?”

  “Yeah. But they won’t cheer so loud when they find out we’re not coming back. They were relying on us to get them off the planet and back into the spiral arm. They’re going to be mad as hell.”

  “Perhaps so.” The ship was rising steadily, and the waving Zardalu were no more than blue dots on the gray-brown beach. Atvar H’sial settled into a more comfortable position at Nenda’s side. “But they ought to be most grateful.”

  “Huh?” The Indulgence was moving faster, above the thick haze of Genizee’s lower atmosphere. Louis gave the Cecropian beside him only a fraction of his attention. Already he was beginning to worry about the next step. They might be off the planet, but they were still deep within the convoluted space-time of the Torvil Anfract.

  “I assert, they should be grateful.” The pheromonal message carried with it an overtone of sleepy satisfaction. There was no hint that half a minute earlier Atvar H’sial had been facing possible death. “Think about it, Louis. We have been very good to them. We did not exterminate them, although the very name of Zardalu strikes terror through the whole spiral arm. We did not kill or mutilate them, although that is their own habit with slaves. We have not taken their most prized possessions — a short-sighted omission on my part, I admit, and one for which I take full responsibility. And we have even left them their planet.”

  “You’re all heart, At.”

  “In Zardalu
terms, we have been Masters both kind and generous.” Atvar H’sial settled lower on the cabin floor. “However, we have done one other thing for the Zardalu, which pleases me less. We have demonstrated that the road to space from Genizee is now open.”

  “No thanks to us that the singularities went away. That just happened. Maybe they’ll come back.” Nenda caught another drift of pheromones, with an unmistakable molecular message. “Hey, you better not be falling asleep back there. This isn’t the time for it. We’re still in the middle of the Anfract. Suppose it’s changing, too? The flight plan we made before may not take us out.”

  “We escaped from Genizee.” The Cecropian was closing the twin yellow horns, turning off her echolocation receivers. The six-foot antennas on top of her head were furling their delicate fanlike receptors. “I have no doubt that you will find a way to take us out of the Torvil Anfract. Wake me when we are clear. Then I will compute a trajectory to take us to the Have-It-All.”

  “Don’t try to get off the hook by talking about my ship.” Nenda turned to glare at Atvar H’sial’s body, with the six jointed legs housed comfortably along its sides. “You need to stay awake and alert. If I don’t handle the exit from the Anfract just right, it could kill you.”

  “But not without also killing you.” The Cecropian’s thin proboscis curled down, to tuck away into the pouch at the bottom of her pleated chin. “You should be gratified, Louis,” she said sleepily, “pleased that I have such confidence in you. And confidence, of course, in your finely-developed sense of self-preservation.”

  Chapter Two

  The Torvil Anfract has a bad reputation, but the reality is worse. Phrases like “multiply-connected space-time” and “macroscopic quantum phenomena” don’t tell the half of it. Anfract is the noun formed from the adjective anfractuous, which means full of twists, turns, and windings; but that gives no more than a flavor of the real thing. Even the knowledge that the whole Anfract is a Builder artifact, of unimaginably vast proportions, fails to deliver the right message.