Transcendence hu-3

by Charles Sheffield

  Kallik was sitting in the niche next to Atvar H’sial, deeply immersed in her own analysis of data. Without examining the outputs, Darya had a good idea what the Hymenopt was doing — she would be sifting the data banks for rumors, speculation, and old legends concerning the Zardalu, and pondering their most likely present location. Darya had been doing the same thing herself. She had reached definite conclusions that she wanted to share with the others — if only the rest would come back from their excursion to the engine room. What was keeping them so long?

  It occurred to her that there was something deeply significant in what was happening. She, Atvar H’sial, and Kallik — the females in the party — were working on the urgent problem of Zardalu location, analyzing and reanalyzing available data. Meanwhile all the males had gone off to play with a dumb gadget, a toy that had sat on the Erebus for millennia and could easily wait another few years before anyone played with it.

  Darya’s peevish thoughts were interrupted by a startling sound from the middle of the control chamber. She turned, and the skin on her arms and the back of her neck tightened into goose bumps.

  A dozen hulking figures stood no more than a dozen paces from her. Towering four meters tall on splayed tentacles of pale aquamarine, the thick cylindrical bodies were topped by bulbous heads of midnight blue, a meter wide. At the base of the head, below the long slit of a mouth, the breeding pouches formed a ring of round-mouthed openings. While Darya looked on in horror, lidded eyes, each as big across as her stretched hand, surveyed the chamber then turned to look down on her. Cruel hooked beaks below the broad-spaced eyes opened wide, and a series of high-pitched chittering sounds emerged.

  Once seen, never forgotten. Zardalu.

  Darya jumped to her feet and backed up to the wall of the chamber. Then she realized that Kallik, across from her, had left her seat and was moving toward the looming figures. The little alien could understand Zardalu speech.

  “Kallik! What are they—” But at that moment the Hymenopt walked right through one of the standing Zardalu, then stood calmly inspecting it with her rear-facing eyes.

  “Remarkable,” Kallik said. She moved to Darya’s side. “More accurate than I would have believed possible. My sincere congratulations.”

  She was talking not to Darya, but to someone who had been sitting tucked out of sight in a niche on the side of the control room. As that figure came into view, Darya saw that it was E.C. Tally. A neural connect cable ran from the base of the skull of the embodied computer, back into the booth.

  “Thank you,” E.C. Tally said. “I must say, I like it myself. But it is not quite right.” He inspected the Zardalu critically, and as Darya watched the aquamarine tentacles of the land-cephalopods darkened a shade and the ring of breeding pouches moved a fraction lower on the torso.

  “Though congratulations are due more to this ship’s image restoration and display facilities,” the embodied computer went on. He circled the group of Zardalu, trailing shiny neural cable along the floor behind him. “All I did was feed it my memories. If something as good as this had been available on Miranda, perhaps I would have had more success in persuading the Council. Do you think that it is a plausible reconstruction, Professor Lang? Or is more work needed before it can mimic reality?”

  Darya was saved from answering by the sound of voices from the control-room entrance. Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka appeared between two of the massive support columns, talking animatedly. They glanced at the Zardalu standing in the middle of the room, then marched across to Darya and Kallik.

  “Nice job, E.C.,” Nenda said casually. “Put it on video and audio when you’re done.” He turned from the embodied computer and the menacing Zardalu, and grinned at Darya. “Professor, we got it. We agree on everything. But me and Rebka gotta have your help persuading Graves and J’merlia.”

  “You’ve got what?” Darya was still feeling like a fool, but she could not help returning Nenda’s grin. Villainous or not, his presence was always so reassuring. She had been unreasonably delighted to see him at their first meeting on the Erebus, and she found herself smiling now.

  “We figured out how to track down the Zardalu.” Hans Rebka flopped down into the chair where Darya had been sitting.

  “Damn right.” But Nenda was turning to face the crouched figure of Atvar H’sial. “Hold on a minute, At’s sending to me. She’s been working the computer. I’ll be back.”

  If Nenda and Rebka agreed on anything, that was a first. It seemed to Darya that they had been snarling at each other since the moment when the Erebus picked up Darya and Hans Rebka and made its subluminal departure from Sentinel Gate. It did not help to be told by Julian Graves that Darya herself was the hidden reason for the argument.

  She watched as Nenda moved to crouch below the carapace of the Cecropian, where pheromonal messages were most easily sent and received, and remained there in silence for half a minute.

  “I don’t see how Atvar H’sial can interface with the computer at all,” Darya said. “The screen is blank, and even if it weren’t, she couldn’t get anything from it.”

  “She does not employ the screen.” Kallik pointed one wiry limb to where Atvar H’sial was now rising to her full height. “She obtains information feedback aurally. She has reprogrammed the oscillators to give audible responses at high frequencies. I hear only the lower end of the range. J’merlia would catch the whole thing, but all of it is too high for human ears.”

  Nenda returned, followed by Atvar H’sial. He was frowning.

  “So now we got three ideas,” he said. He stared at Darya and Kallik. “I hope that neither of you two think you know where the Zardalu are.”

  “I do,” Darya said.

  “Then we got problems. So does At.”

  “And I also have suggestions.” Kallik spoke softly and diffidently. Since they had been reunited, Darya had noticed a strange change in the relationship between Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial, and their former — or was it current? — slaves. Kallik and J’merlia had greeted their sometime owners with huge and unconcealed joy, and those owners were clearly delighted to see them. But no one was sure how to behave. The Lo’tfian and the Hymenopt were ready and eager to take orders, but the Cecropian and the Karelian human were not giving them. Nenda in particular was on his absolute best behavior — which was not very good, in terms of social graces. If Darya had been forced to introduce him to the research staff of the Institute, Professor Merada would have had a fit. But Glenna Omar, with her appetite for anything rough and male, would more likely have been all over him.

  She pushed away that last thought as unworthy as Nenda scratched thoughtfully at his backside, sniffed, and dropped into a chair next to Hans Rebka.

  “We gotta sort all this out quick,” he said. “We sit here jerking ourselves off, while new little Zardalu must be poppin’ out of the pouches every five minutes.”

  “We must proceed,” Rebka said. He and Nenda were having their usual silent tussle as to who was in charge, something they did whenever Julian Graves was not around. “We can’t afford to wait for the other two to show up. It seems that we all have ideas, so who wants to go first?”

  Darya realized that Kallik was glancing deferentially in their direction.

  “I guess that I do,” she said. “What I have to say won’t take long. I’ll start with two facts: First, when the Builder transportation system returned us from Serenity, it landed us in different parts of the spiral arm. But in every case, we came out on or next door to the location of a Builder artifact. Second, no one has reported the sighting of any live Zardalu — and you can bet that would make news everywhere. So I deduce two things. First, the Zardalu would almost certainly have arrived close to an artifact, too. And second, that artifact cannot be in Fourth Alliance territory, or in the Cecropia Federation, or even in the Phemus Circle. It has to be where you might expect Zardalu to be sent — to a location somewhere in the territories of the Zardalu Communion. That makes sense for two reasons: the Zardal
u were originally picked up there; and the Communion still has a lot of unexplored territory. If you wanted to disappear, and remain hidden, that’s the first place in the spiral arm that you’d pick.”

  She stared around at five silent and expressionless faces. “Any comment?”

  “Go on,” Rebka said. “No quarrels so far. Where do you go from here?”

  “I know the locations of all the Builder artifacts. Three hundred and seventy-seven of them lie within the Zardalu Communion territory. A hundred and forty-nine of those lie in fairly remote territory, where a Zardalu appearance might not be spotted at once. More than that, if you go along with my assumption that the Zardalu had to land someplace close to one of those artifacts, then I can narrow the field a lot further. You see, for many artifacts there’s just no planet within many light-years where an air-breathing life-form can survive. Throw in that requirement, and you have my final list.”

  She turned to the console and touched three keys. “And here it is, along with my calculations.”

  “Sixty-one planets, around thirty-three different stars.” Louis Nenda was frowning. “I can rule out a couple of those — I know ’em. Don’t forget Kallik and me are from the Communion. But it’s still too many. Hold on a minute, while I pass your list to At.”

  The others waited impatiently during the transfer. Nenda was still in silent dialogue with the Cecropian when Julian Graves and J’merlia arrived in the control room. Rebka gestured to Darya’s list, still on the screen. “Candidate places we might find Zardalu. Too many.”

  “And while I have no wish to complicate matters” — Kallik was busy at the console — “here are the results of my analysis, quite independently evolved although with a similar guiding logic.”

  Another substantial list was appearing on the screen, next to Darya’s. “Seventy-two planets,” Kallik said apologetically, “around forty-one different stars. And only twenty-three planets in common with Professor Lang.”

  “And it’s getting worse,” Nenda said. “Atvar H’sial did her own analysis, with a logic similar to Darya’s. But she didn’t prepare it for visual output. She’s doing that now.”

  The Cecropian was back at her console. Within a few seconds, a third long list and a series of equations began to appear on the displays. Julian Graves groaned as it went on and on. “Worse and worse.”

  “Eighty-four planets,” E.C. Tally said. “Around forty-five stars.” The embodied computer’s internal processing unit, with a clock rate of eighteen attoseconds, could query the ship’s data bank through the attached neural cable and perform a full statistical analysis while the humans were still trying to read the list. “Twenty-nine planets,” he went on, “in common with Professor Lang, thirty in common with Kallik, and eleven planets common to all three. There is a sixty-two percent probability that the planet sought is one of the eleven, and a fifteen percent chance that it is not any one of the one hundred and forty-six in the combined list.”

  “Which says you got too many places, and lousy odds.” Nenda turned to Hans Rebka. “So I guess it’s our turn in the barrel. You want to tell it? People tend to get sort of excited when I say things.”

  Rebka shrugged. He moved to sit closer to Darya. “Nenda and I did our own talking when we were in the engine room. What you three did was interesting, a nice, abstract analysis; but we think you’re missing a basic point.

  “You said, hey, nobody reported Zardalu in the Fourth Alliance or the Cecropia Federation or the Phemus Circle, so that means they can’t be there. But you know the Zardalu as well as we do. Don’t you think it’s more likely that they didn’t get reported because there was nobody left to report them? If you want to find Zardalu, you look for evidence of violence. Better yet, you look for evidence of disappearances somewhere close to a Builder artifact. If the Zardalu arrived in the spiral arm and took a ship to get them back to their home planet, they’d have made sure there were no survivors to talk about it. Nenda and I took a look at recent shipping records for spiral arm travel, close to Builder artifacts, to see how many interstellar ships just vanished and never showed up again. We found two hundred and forty of them, all in the past year. Forty-three of them look like real mysteries — no unusual space conditions at time of disappearance, no debris, no distress messages. Here they are.”

  He pulled a listing from his pocket and handed it to E.C. Tally, who said at once, “Not much correlation with the earlier tabulations. And scattered all over the spiral arm.”

  “Sure. Given a ship, the Zardalu could have gone to a world a long way from the artifact where they first arrived.”

  “Except that if they went through many Bose Transitions, they would have been observed.” Darya stood up, heard her voice rising, and knew she was doing what she insisted that a scientist should never do: allowing passion and the defense of personal theories to interfere with logical analysis. She sat down sharply. “Perhaps you’re right, Hans. But don’t you think they have to be within one or two transitions of where they first arrived in the spiral arm?”

  “I’d like to think so. But I still favor our analysis over yours. What you said was reasonable, in a reasonable world, but violence plays a bigger part in the universe than reason — especially when it comes to the Zardalu.”

  “And psychology and fixed behavior patterns play a larger part than either.” It was Julian Graves, who had so far remained a silent observer. “They are factors which have so far been omitted from consideration, but I am convinced they are central to the solution of our problem.”

  “Psychology!” Nenda spat out the word like an oath. “Don’t gimme any of that stuff. If you’re gonna question our search logic, you better have something a lot better than psychology to support it.”

  “Psychology and behavior patterns. What do you think it is that decides what you, or a Zardalu, or any other intelligent being, will do, if it is not psychology? J’merlia and I discussed this problem, after you and Captain Rebka left, and we were able to take our ideas quite a long way. On one point, we agree with you completely: the Zardalu would not be content to stay near an artifact, although they probably arrived there. They would leave quickly, if for no other reason than their own safety. There is too much activity around the artifacts. They would seek a planet, preferably a planet where they would be safe from discovery and able to hide away and breed freely. So where do you think that they would go?”

  Nenda glowered. “Hell, don’t ask me. There could be a thousand places — a million.”

  “If you ignore psychology, there could be. But put yourself in their position. The Zardalu will do just what you would do. If you wanted to hide away, where would you go?”

  “Me? I’d go to Karelia, or someplace near it. But I’m damned sure the Zardalu wouldn’t go there.”

  “Of course not. Because they are not Karelians. But the analogy still holds. The Zardalu will do just what you would do — they would try to go home. That means they would head for Genizee, the homeworld of the Zardalu clade.”

  “But the location of Genizee has never been determined,” Darya protested. “It has been lost since the time of the Great Rising.”

  “It has.” Graves sighed. “Lost to us. But assuredly not lost to the Zardalu. And although they do not know it, it is the safest of all possible places for them — a world that, in eleven thousand years of searching, none of the vengeful subject races enslaved by the Zardalu has ever succeeded in finding. The ultimate, perfect hiding place.”

  “Perfect, except for one little detail,” Rebka said. “It’s ideal for them, but it’s sure as hell not perfect for us. We have to find them! I don’t agree with the approach that Darya Lang and Atvar H’sial and Kallik propose, but even if it’s wrong it at least tells us what places to look. So does the approach that Louis Nenda and I favor, and I’m convinced that it’s the right approach. But you and J’merlia are telling us to go look for a place that no one has ever found, in eleven millennia of trying. And you have no suggestions as to how we o
ught to start looking. Aren’t you just telling us that the job is hopeless?”

  “No.” Julian Graves was rubbing at his bulging skull in a perplexed fashion. “I am telling you something much worse than that. I am saying that although the task appears hopeless and the problem insoluble, we absolutely must solve it. Or the Zardalu will breed back to strength. And our failure will place in jeopardy the whole spiral arm.”

  The tension in the great control chamber had been rising, minute by minute. Individuals were listening to the arguments presented by others, at the same time as they prepared to defend their own theories, regardless of merit.

  Darya had seen it happen a hundred times in Institute faculty meetings, and much as she hated and despised the process, she was not immune to it. You proposed a theory. Even in your own mind, it began as no more than tentative. Then it was questioned, or criticized — and as soon as it was attacked, emotion took over. You prepared to defend it to the death.

  It had needed those ominous words of Julian Graves, calmly delivered, to make her and the others forget their pet theories. The emotional heat in the chamber suddenly dropped fifty degrees.

  This isn’t a stupid argument over tenure or publication precedence or budgets, thought Darya. This is important. What’s at stake here is the future, of every species in this region of the galaxy.

  An uncomfortable silence blanketed the chamber, suggesting that others were sharing her revelation. It was broken at last by E.C. Tally. The embodied computer was still wearing the neural cable plugged into the base of his skull. Like a gigantic shiny pigtail, it ran twenty yards back to the information-center attachment.

  “May I speak?”

  For once in E.C. Tally’s life, no one objected as he went on: “We have heard three distinct theories regarding the present location of the Zardalu. At least one of those theories exists in three different variants. Might I, with all due respect, advance the notion that all the theories are wrong in part?”