Transcendence hu-3

by Charles Sheffield

  Even with his augment, Nenda lacked the Cecropian’s infinitely refined sensitivity to odors. He took them up floor by floor in the elevator, until Atvar H’sial finally nodded.

  “This one.” But now the pheromones carried a hint of concern.

  “What’s wrong, At?”

  “In addition to traces of my J’merlia, and to your Hymenopt, Kallik…” She was moving along a broad corridor, and at last paused before a door tall and wide enough to admit something twice her size. “I seem to detect — wait!”

  It was too late. Nenda had pressed the side plate and the great door was already sliding open. The Cecropian and the Karelian human found themselves on the threshold of a domed and cavernous chamber, forty meters across.

  Nenda peered in through the gloom. “You were wrong, At. There’s nobody in here.”

  But the Cecropian had reared up to her full height and was pointing off to the side where two figures were bent over a low table. They looked up as the door opened. There was a gasp of mutual recognition. Instead of seeing the stick-thin figure of a Lo’tfian and the tubby round body of the Hymenopt, Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial were facing the human forms of Alliance Councilor Graves and embodied computer, E.C. Tally.

  “We were dumped off in the middle of nowhere…”

  There had been half a minute of surprised and unproductive reaction — “What are you two doing here? You’re supposed to be off chasing Zardalu…” “More to the point, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be thirty thousand light-years away, out on Serenity and fighting each other…” After a little of that, Louis Nenda had been given the floor. His pheromonal aside to Atvar H’sial — Don’t worry. Trust me! — went unnoticed by the other two.

  “… dumped with just the clothes we were wearing, and no warning that anything funny was going to happen. One minute we were standing in one of the main chambers, the same one where we rolled the Zardalu into the transition vortex—”

  — and where we had the biggest pile of loot pulled together that you’d see in a dozen lifetimes. I know, At, I’m not going to say that. But it’s hard — fifty new bits of Builder technology, each one priceless and ready to grab. Two and a half months’ work, all down the tubes. Well, no good crying over what might have been —

  And may yet be, Louis. Surrender wins no wars.

  Mebbe. It’s still hard.

  Graves and E.C. Tally were staring at Nenda, puzzled by his sudden silence. He returned to human speech: “Sorry. Started thinkin’ about it again. Anyway, all of a sudden Speaker-Between, that know-it-all Builder construct, popped up right behind us, quiet like, so we didn’t know he was there. He said, ‘This is not what was agreed to. It is unacceptable.’ And the next minute—”

  “May I speak?” E.C. Tally’s voice was loud and off-putting.

  Nenda turned to Julian Graves. “Couldn’t you stop him doing that when you gave him a new body copy? What’s wrong now, E.C.?”

  “It was reported to me by Councilor Graves that you and Atvar H’sial were left behind on Serenity not to cooperate, but to engage in single combat. That is not at all the way that you are now describing matters.”

  “Ah, well, that was somethin’ me and At worked out after your lot had left. Better to cooperate at first, see, until we understood the environment on Serenity, an’ after that we’d have plenty of time to fight it out between us—”

  — as indeed we would have fought, Louis, once we were home in the spiral arm with substantial booty. For there are limits to cooperation, and the Builder treasures are vast. But pray continue…

  If anyone will let me, I will. Shut up, At, so I can talk.

  “ — so Atvar H’sial and I had been working together, trying to figure out where the Zardalu were likely to have gone after they left Serenity—” And making sure we didn’t finish up anywhere near them when we left Serenity ourselves. ” — because, you see, there was this little baby Zardalu who had been left behind when all the others went ass-over-tentacle down the chute—”

  “Excuse me.” Julian Graves’s great bald, radiation-scarred head nodded forward on its pipestem neck. “This is of extreme importance. Are you saying that there was a Zardalu left behind on Serenity?”

  “That’s exactly what I said. You have a problem with that, Councilor?”

  “On the contrary. And by the way, it is now ex-councilor. I resigned from the Council over this very issue. The Alliance Council listened — perfunctorily, in my opinion — and rejected our concerns in their totality! They do not believe that we traveled together to Serenity. They do not believe that we encountered Builder sentient artifacts. Worst of all, they deny that we encountered living, breathing Zardalu. They claim we imagined all of it. So if you have with you a specimen, an infant or a dead body, or even the smallest end sucker of a tentacle—”

  “Sorry. I hear you, but we don’t have even a sniff. It’s Speaker-Between’s dumb fault again. He accused me and Atvar H’sial of cooperating, instead of feuding; and before we could tell him that he was full of it, he made one of those hissing teakettle noises like he was boiling over, and another one of them vortices swirled up right next to us. It threw us into the Builder transportation system. Just before the vortex got us it grabbed the little Zardalu. He went God-knows-where. We haven’t seen him since. Atvar H’sial and I come out together in the ass end of the Zardalu Communion, on a little rathole of a planet called Peppermill. But my ship was still on Glister, along with all our major credit. It took our last sou to get us to Miranda. And here we are.”

  “May I speak?” But this time Tally did not wait for permission. “You are here. I see that. But why are you here? I mean, why did you come to Miranda, where neither you nor Atvar H’sial are at home? Why did you not go to some other and more familiar region of the spiral arm?”

  Careful! Councilor Graves, whether he be Julius, Steven, or Julian, can read more truth than you think. Atvar H’sial’s comment to Louis Nenda was more a command than a warning.

  Relax, At! This is the time to tell the truth. “Because until we can return to the planetoid Glister and to my ship, the Have-It-All, Atvar H’sial and I are flat broke. The only valuable things that either of us own” — Nenda reached into his pants pocket, pulled out two little squares of recorder plastic, and squeezed them — “are these.”

  Under the pressure of his fingers, the squares began to intone simultaneously: “This is the ownership certificate of the Lo’tfian, J’merlia, ID 1013653, with all rights assigned to the Cecropian dominatrix, Atvar H’sial.” “This is the ownership certificate of the Hymenopt, Kallik WSG, ID 265358979, with all rights assigned to the Karelian human, Louis Nenda.” And to repeat: “This is the ownership certificate of the Lo’tfian, J’merlia, ID—”

  “That’ll do.” Nenda pressed the edge of the plastic wafers, and they fell silent. “The slaves J’merlia and Kallik are the only assets we got left, but we own ’em free and clear, as you know and as these documents prove.”

  Nenda paused for breath. The hard bit was coming right now.

  “So we’ve come here to claim ’em and take ’em back to Miranda Port, and rent ’em out so we’ll have enough credit to travel back to Glister and get the Have-It-All.” He glared at Graves. “And it’s no good you gettin’ mad and tellin’ us that J’merlia and Kallik are free agents because we let ’em go free back on Serenity, because none of that’s documented, and these” — he waved the squares — “prove otherwise. So don’t give me any of that. Just tell me, where are they?”

  Graves was going to give him a big argument, Nenda just knew it. He faced the councilor, waiting for the outburst.

  It never came. Multiple expressions were running across Graves’s face, but not one of them looked like anger. There was satisfaction and irony, and even what might be a certain amount of sympathy in those mad and misty gray eyes.

  “I cannot deliver J’merlia and Kallik to you, Louis Nenda,” he said. “Even if I would. For one very good reason. They ar
e not here. Both of them left Delbruck just two hours ago — on a high-speed transit to Miranda Port.”

  MIRANDA PORT

  “If you wait long enough in the Miranda Spaceport, you’ll run into everyone worth meeting in the whole spiral arm.”

  There’s a typical bit of Fourth Alliance thinking for you. Pure flummery. The humans of the Alliance are a cocky lot — no surprise in that, all the senior clade species think they’re God’s gift to the universe, with an inflated view of the importance of their own headquarters world and its spaceport.

  But I’m telling you, the first time you visit Miranda Port, you think for a while that the Alliance puffery might be right.

  I’ve seen a thousand ports in my time, from the miniship jet points of the Berceuse Chute to the free-space Ark Launch Complex. I’ve been as close as any human dare go to the Builder Synapse, where the test ships shimmer and sparkle and disappear, and no one has ever figured out where those poor bugger “volunteers” inside them go, or why the lucky ones come back.

  And Miranda Port? Right up there with the best of them, when it comes to pure boggle-factor.

  Visualize a circular plain on a planetary surface, two hundred miles across — and I mean a plain, absolutely level, not part of the surface of the globe. The whole downside of Miranda Port is flat to the millimeter, so the center of the circle is a mile and a half closer to the middle of the planet than the level of the outer edge.

  Now imagine that you start driving in from that outer edge toward the middle, across a uniform flat blackness like polished glass. It’s hot, and the atmosphere of Miranda is muggy and a bit hazy. At ten miles in you pass the first ring of buildings — warehouses and storage areas, thousand after thousand of them, thirty stories high and extending that far and more under the surface. You keep going, past the second and third and fourth storage areas, and into the first and second passenger arrival zones. You see humans in all shapes and sizes, plus Cecropians and Varnians and Lo’tfians and Hymenopts and giggling empty-headed Ditrons, and you wonder if it’s all going on forever. But as you clear the second passenger ring, you notice two things. First, there’s a thin vertical line dead ahead, just becoming visible on the horizon. And second, it’s midday but it’s getting darker.

  You stare at that vertical line for maybe a couple of seconds. You know it must be the bottom of the stalk, running from the center of Miranda Port right up to stationary orbit, and it’s no big deal — nothing compared to the forty-eight Basal Stalks that connect Cocoon to the planetary surface of Savalle.

  But it’s still getting darker, so you look up. And then you catch your first sight of the Shroud, the edge of it starting to intersect the sun’s disk. There’s the Upside of Miranda Port, the mushroom cap of the Stalk. The Shroud is nine thousand miles across. That’s where the real business is done — the only place in the spiral arm where a Bose access node lies so close to a planet.

  You stop the car, and your mind starts running. There’s a million starships warehoused and netted up there on the edge of the Shroud, some of ’em going for a song. You know that in half an hour you could be ascending the Stalk; in less than a day you’d be up there on the Shroud, picking out some neat little vessel. And a few hours after that you could be whomping through a Transition on the Bose Network, off to another access node a dozen or a hundred or even a thousand light-years away…

  And if you’re an old traveler like me, there’s the real magic of Miranda Port; the way you can sit flat on the surface of a planet, like any dead-dog stay-at-home Downsider, and know that you’re only a day away from the whole spiral arm. Before you know it you’re itching for another look at the million-mile lightning bolts playing among the friction rings of Culmain, or wondering what worlds the Tristan free-space Manticore is dreaming these days, or what new lies and boasts old Dulcimer, the Chism Polypheme, is telling in the spaceport bar on Bridle Gap. And suddenly you want to watch the Universe turn into kaleidoscope again, out of the edge of the Torvil Anfract in far Communion territory, where space-time knots and snarls and turns around itself like an old man’s memories…

  —from Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort: Jetting Alone Around the Galaxy; being the personal and unadorned reminiscences of Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloan (Retired)

  (Published by Wideawake Press, March E.4125; remaindered, May E.4125; available only in the Rare Publications Department of the Cam H’ptiar/Emserin Library.)

  Chapter Four

  Money and credit meant little to an interspecies Council member. To serve the prestigious needs of a Council project, any planet in the spiral arm would readily turn over the best of its resources; and should there ever be any hesitation, a councilor had final authority to commandeer exactly who and what was needed.

  But for an ex-councilor, one who had resigned in protest…

  After a lifetime in which costs were irrelevant, Julian Graves was suddenly exposed to the real world. He looked on his new credit, and found it wanting.

  “The ship we can afford won’t be very big, and it doesn’t have to be brand-new.” He offered to J’merlia the authorization to draw on his private funds. “But make sure that it has defensive weapons. When we track down the Zardalu, we cannot assume that they will be friendly.”

  The Lo’tfian was too polite to comment. But J’merlia’s pale-lemon eyes rolled on their short eyestalks and swiveled to glance at E.C. Tally and Kallik. They were not likely to assume that the Zardalu would be friendly. The last time that the four of them had encountered Zardalu, E.C. Tally’s body had been torn to pieces and the little Hymenopt, Kallik, had had one leg pulled off. Julian Graves himself had been blinded and had required a new pair of eyes. He seemed to have forgotten all about that.

  “But range and drive capability are even more important,” Graves went on. “We have no idea how far we will have to go, or how many Bose Transitions we will be obliged to make.”

  J’merlia was nodding, while at his side Kallik was bobbing up and down on her eight springy legs. The Hymenopt had found the endless formal proceedings of the Council hearing dull and hard to endure. She was itching for action. When Graves held out his credit authorization she grabbed it with a whistle of satisfaction.

  The same urge to be up and doing had dictated the actions of Kallik and J’merlia when they flew out of Delbruck and came to Miranda Port. Catalogs of every vessel in the shroud moorings were held in the Downside catalogs, and a prospective buyer could call up specifications on any of the ships. She could even conjure a 3-D holographic reconstruction that allowed her to wander vicariously through the interior, listen to the engines, and inspect passenger accommodations. Without ever leaving Downside she could do everything but stroke the polished trim, press the control button, and smell the Bose Drive’s ozone.

  But that was exactly what Kallik was keen to do. At her urging, she and J’merlia headed at once to the base of the Stalk. In the very moment when Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial were entering Delbruck, their former slaves were lifting for free-fall, the Shroud, and the Upside Sales Center.

  It was not practical to make a physical inspection of more than a tiny fraction of the ships. With an inventory of almost a million vessels scattered through a hundred million cubic miles of space, and with ships of every age, size, and condition, even Kallik admitted that the selection had to begin with a computer search. And that meant the central office of Upside Sales.

  It was the tail end of a busy period when they arrived, and the manager eyed the two newcomers with no enthusiasm. She was tired, her feet were hurting, and she did not feel she was looking at sales potential. There were funny-looking aliens aplenty running around Miranda Port, but mostly they didn’t buy ships. Humans bought ships.

  The skinny one was a Lo’tfian, and like all Lo’tfians he seemed mostly a tangle of arms and legs. The eight black articulated limbs were attached to a long, pipestem torso, and his narrow head was dominated by the big, lemon-colored compound eyes. In the experience of the sales manag
er, Lo’tfians did not have money, or make purchase decisions. They did not even speak for themselves. They accompanied Cecropians as translators and servants, and they never offered a word of their own.

  The Lo’tfian’s companion was even worse. There were eight legs again, but these sprang from a short, stubby torso covered with fine black fur, and the small, smooth head was entirely surrounded by multiple pairs of bright, black eyes. It had to be a Hymenopt, a rarity outside the worlds of the Zardalu Communion — and a dangerous being, if reputation was anything to go by. Hymenopts had superfast reactions, and the end of the rotund body concealed a deadly sting.

  Could the pair even talk? The only sound that the aliens were making was an odd series of clicks and whistles.

  “Patience, Kallik.” The skinny Lo’tfian switched to human speech as he turned to the sales manager. He held out a bank chit. “Greetings. I am J’merlia, and this is Kallik. We are here to buy a ship.”

  So at least one of them could talk human. And he had credit. That was a surprise. The manager’s first reaction — don’t waste five seconds on these two — was overridden by long training. She took the chit that the Lo’tfian was holding out to her and performed an automatic check on it.

  She sniffed.

  Two dozen eyes blinked at her. “Are we in luck?” the Hymenopt asked.

  So they could both speak.

  “You’re lucky in at least one way. The choice won’t be too difficult. You won’t have to worry about ninety-nine percent of our inventory.”

  “Why not?” Kallik’s circular ring of black eyes was taking in the holograms of a dozen ships at once.

  “Because you don’t have enough credit to buy them. For instance, you can’t have any of the ones that you’re looking at right now. Can you give me a summary of your requirements?”