“So why are you willing to deal with him, if he’s such an awful person?”
Nenda gave her the all-admiring, half-pitying glance that so annoyed Hans Rebka, and stroked her upper arm. “First, sweetie, because you know where you stand with a guaranteed liar. An’ second, because we got no option. Who else would be crazy enough to fly into the Anfract? And be good enough to get us there. You only use a Polypheme when you’re desperate, but they’re mebbe the galaxy’s best pilots, and Dulcimer’s top of the lot. He usually needs work, too, ’cause he has this little problem that needs feedin’. Last of all, we want Dulcimer because he’s a survivor. He claims he’s fifteen thousand years old. I think he’s lying — that would mean he was around before the Great Rising, when the Zardalu ruled the Communion — but the records on Bridle Gap show he’s been droppin’ into the Sun Bar there for over three thousand years. That’s a survivor. I like to go with survivors.”
Because you are one, yourself, Darya thought. And you’re a liar, too — and you’re self-serving. So why do I like you? And speaking of lying…
“Louis, when you told us how you and Atvar H’sial left Serenity, you said something I don’t understand.”
“We didn’t just leave — we were thrown out, by that dumb Builder construct, Speaker-Between.”
“I know that. But you said something else about Speaker-Between. You said that you thought it was lying about the Builders themselves.”
“I never said it was lying. I said I thought it was wrong. Big difference. Speaker-Between believes what it told us. It’s been sittin’ on Serenity for four or five million years, convinced that the Builders are just waitin’ in stasis until Speaker-Between and The-One-Who-Waits an’ who knows how many other constructs have selected the right species to help the Builders. An’ then the Builders will pop back out of stasis, and everything will be fine, and Speaker-Between and his lot will live happy ever after.
“Except that’s all bunk. Speaker-Between’s dodderin’ along, doing what it thinks it was told to do. But I don’t believe that’s what it was really told by the Builders. You can get things screwed up pretty bad in five million years. Atvar H’sial agrees with me — the constructs are conscientious, an’ real impressive when you first meet ’em. An’ they got lots of power, too. But they’re not very smart.”
“If that’s true, where are the Builders? And what do they really want the constructs to do?”
“Beats me. That’s more your line than mine. An’ right now I don’t much care. We got other worries.” Nenda turned, to where Atvar H’sial had finished connecting the supply lines. “Like how we land on Bridle Gap. We’ll be there in two days. The Erebus can’t go down, because J’merlia and Kallik were dumb enough to buy us a Flying Dutchman. An’ we don’t have credit to rent a downside shuttle. So you better cross your fingers.”
Atvar H’sial was turning spigots, and the pipes leading to the brown ovoid were filling with cloudy liquid. Darya followed Louis Nenda and bent to stare at the shiny surface of the egg.
“What is it?”
“That’s the question of the moment. This is the gizmo that Julian Graves found when he was pokin’ around the other day. No one could identify it, but yesterday At took a peek at its inside with ultrasonics. She thinks it might be a ship-seed. The Erebus is a Tantalus orbital fort, so it never expected to land anywhere. But there would be times when people on board needed to escape. There were a dozen of these eggs, stacked away close to the main hatch. In a few hours we’ll know what we’ve got. ’Scuse me. At says I hafta get busy.”
He hurried away from Darya to crouch by the spigots and control their flow. Fluids were moving faster through the supply lines, and the glossy surface of the ellipsoid was beginning to swell ominously. A soft, throbbing tone came from its interior.
“Don’t get too close,” Nenda called.
The warning was unnecessary. As the egg began to quiver, Darya turned and headed out through the exit of the auxiliary engine room. Nenda had given her a lot to think about.
Atvar H’sial watched until Darya was out of sight. “That departure is not before time, Louis Nenda.” The pheromonal message carried a reproving overtone. “As I remarked before, the human female provides an undesirable distraction for you.”
“Relax, At. She don’t care about me, and I don’t care about her. All she’s worried about is the Builders, and where they are.”
“I am not persuaded; nor, I suspect, is Captain Rebka.”
“Who can go stick it up his nose. And so can you.” Louis spoke in irritated tones — but he did not provide his final comment in pheromonal translation.
The world of Bridle Gap had never been settled by humans.
The reason for that was obvious to the crew of the Erebus long before they arrived there. The parent star, Cavesson, was a tiny fierce point of violet-blue at the limit of the visible spectrum, sitting within a widespread shell of glowing gas. The stellar collapse and shrugging off of outer layers that had turned Cavesson into a neutron star forty thousand years earlier would have vaporized Bridle Gap — if that world had been close-by at the time. Even today, the outpouring of X- rays and hard ultraviolet from Cavesson created an ionized shroud at the outer edge of Bridle Gap’s atmosphere. Enough ultraviolet came blazing through to the surface to fry an unshielded human in minutes.
“It must have been a rogue planet,” said Julian Graves. The Erebus had sat in parking orbit for a couple of hours, while the ship’s scopes revealed as much surface detail as possible. Now it was time for action.
“It was on a close-approach trajectory to Cavesson,” he went on, “and if the star hadn’t blown up, Bridle Gap would have swung right on by. But the ejecta from Cavesson smacked into it and transferred enough momentum to shove it to a capture orbit.”
“And if you believe that,” Hans Rebka said softly to E.C. Tally, “you’ll believe anything.”
“But you reject that explanation?” The embodied computer was standing between Rebka and Darya Lang, waiting for Atvar H’sial’s signal from within the seedship that the interior was thoroughly hardened and the little vessel ready to board.
Rebka gestured to the blazing point-image of Cavesson. “See for yourself, E.C. You take a look at the spectrum of that, then tell me what sort of life could develop on a void-cold rogue world, far from any star, but adapt fast enough to survive the sleet of radiation from Cavesson.”
“Then what is your explanation for the existence of Bridle Gap?”
“Nothing to make you feel comfortable. Bridle Gap was moved here by the Zardalu, when they controlled this whole region. The Zardalu had great powers when humans were still swinging in the trees — just another reason to worry about them now.” He began to move forward. “Wherever it came from, the planet must have had natural high-radiation life-forms. You’ll see them for yourself in a couple of hours, because it looks like we’re ready to go.”
Louis Nenda had appeared from within the seedship’s hatch. “Tight squeeze,” he said. “And goin’ to be rough when we get down there. Sure one of you don’t want to stay with the rest?”
Rebka ignored the invitation to remain behind and pushed E.C. Tally on ahead of him into the seedship’s interior. With Atvar H’sial already inside, it was a tight fit. The seed, full-grown, was a disappointment. The hope had been for a sizable lifeboat, capable of carrying a substantial fraction of the Erebus’s total passenger capacity. Instead the final seedship proved to be a midget: puny engines, no Bose Drive, and only enough room to squeeze in four or five people. The landing party had been whittled down: Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial, most familiar with Zardalu Communion territory and customs; E.C. Tally, to provide an exact visual and sound record of what happened on the surface, to be played back for the others who stayed on board the Erebus; and finally Hans Rebka, for the good — but unmentioned — reason that somebody less naive than E.C. Tally was needed to keep an eye on Nenda and Atvar H’sial.
The group remaining on the E
rebus had been assigned one unrewarding but necessary task: to learn all that could be learned about the Torvil Anfract.
The planet that the seedship drifted down to was at its best from a distance. Two hundred miles up, the surface was a smoky palette of soft purple and gray. By two thousand feet that soft, airbrushed texture had resolved to a jumbled wilderness of broken, steep-sided cliffs, their faces covered with spiky gray trees and shrubs. The landing port for Bridle Gap occupied half of an isolated long, fat gash on the surface, with a dark body of water at its lower end. Louis Nenda took the ship down with total confidence and landed at the water’s edge.
“That’ll do. Cross your fingers and claws. We’ll know in another five minutes if Dulcimer’s here.” He was already smearing thick yellow cream over his face and hands.
“Five minutes?” E.C. Tally said. “But what about the time it takes to clear customs and Immigration?”
Nenda gave him one incredulous stare and continued applying the cream. “Better get coated, too, ’less you wanna crisp out there in two seconds.” He went to the hatch, cracked it open and sniffed, then fitted improvised goggles into position. “Not bad. I’m goin’. Follow me as soon as you’re ready.”
Hans Rebka was right behind as Nenda stepped out onto the surface.
He gazed all around and made his own evaluation. He had never been to this particular planet, but he had seen a dozen that rivaled it. Bridle Gap was bad, and one would never go outside at noon, but it was no worse than his birthworld of Teufel, where no one who wanted to live went out while the Remouleur dawn wind blew.
He looked east through his goggles, to where Cavesson’s morning rays were barely clearing the jagged upthrust fingers of the cliffs. The sun’s bright point was diffused by the atmosphere, and the breeze on his face was actually chilly. He knew better than to be misled by either of those. Even thinned by dust and cloud and ozone, Cavesson was delivering to the surface of Bridle Gap a hundred times as much UV as a human’s eyes and skin could tolerate. The air smelled like a continuous electrical discharge. The flowers on the vegetation at water’s edge confirmed the deadly surroundings. Drab gray and sable to Rebka’s vision, they would glow and dazzle out in the ultraviolet, where the tiny winged pollinators of Bridle Gap saw most clearly.
It was also a low-gravity world, well-suited to Atvar H’sial’s physiology. While Rebka was still staring around, the Cecropian floated past him in a gliding leap that carried her to Louis Nenda’s side. He had reached a long, low building built partly on the spaceport’s rocky surface and partly in the black water beyond it. Together, the Cecropian and the Karelian human waded through shallow water to reach the entrance to the Sun Bar.
Hans Rebka took a quick glance back at the seedship. There was still no sign of E.C. Tally, but it would be a mistake to let Nenda and Atvar H’sial begin a meeting alone. Rebka had heard their explanation of what they had been doing on Serenity that led to their expulsion and return to the spiral arm. He did not believe a word of it.
He splashed forward, entered a dark doorway of solid obsidian, and took off his goggles to find himself confronted by a waist-high circle of bright black eyes.
The neurotoxic sting of a Hymenopt was deadly, and the chance that this one understood human speech was small. Rebka pointed to the backs of Nenda and Atvar H’sial, visible through another stone doorway, and walked steadily that way without speaking. He followed them through three more interior rooms, then set his goggles in position again as he emerged into a chamber that was open to the glaring sky, with a ledge of rock across its full width, ending at oily black water.
A dozen creatures of all shapes and sizes lay on the ledge, soaking in Cavesson’s lethal rays. Louis Nenda advanced to speak to one of them. After a few seconds it rose to balance on its thick tail and came wriggling back into the covered part of the room.
“Hello there.” The voice was a croaking growl. The blubbery green lips of a broad mouth pursed into an awful imitation of a human smile. “Honored to meet you, sirs. Excuse my bare condition, but I was just having myself a bit of a wallowbake. Dulcimer, Master Pilot, at your service.”
Rebka had never met a Chism Polypheme, but he had seen too many aliens to consider this one as anything more than a variation on a theme, one who happened to lack both radial and bilateral symmetry. The alien was a nine-foot helical cylinder, a corkscrew of smooth muscle covered with rubbery green skin and topped by a head the same width as the body. A huge eye of slaty gray, shifty and bulging, leered out from under a scaly browridge. The lidded ocular was half as wide as the head itself. Between that and the pouting mouth, the tiny gold-rimmed pea of a scanning eye continuously flickered across the scene. As Rebka watched, five flexible three-fingered limbs, all on one side of the pliant body and each just long enough to reach across it, picked up a corsetlike pink garment from the ledge, wrapped it around the Polypheme’s middle, and hooked it in place. The five arms poked through five holes, to lodge comfortably into broad lateral slings on the corset. The alien tightened its corkscrew body and crouched lower onto the massive, coiled tail to match Rebka’s height.
“At your service,” the croaking voice repeated. The scanning eye on its short eyestalk roved the room, then returned to stare uneasily at the towering blind form of Atvar H’sial, twice the size of the humans. “Cecropian, eh. Don’t see too many of you in these parts. You’re needing a top pilot, do you say?”
Atvar H’sial did not move a millimeter. “We are,” Rebka said.
“Then you need look no farther.” The main eye turned to Rebka. “I’ve guided ten thousand missions, every one a success. I know the galaxy better than any living being, probably better than any dead one, too. Though I say it myself, you couldn’t have better luck than getting me as your pilot.”
“That’s what we’ve heard. You’re the best.” And the only one crazy enough to take the job, Rebka thought. But flattery cost nothing.
“I am, sir, the very best. No use denying it, Dulcimer is the finest there is. And your own name, sir, if I might ask it?”
“I am Captain Hans Rebka, from the Phemus Circle. This is Louis Nenda, a Karelian human, and our Cecropian friend is Atvar H’sial.”
Dulcimer did not speak, but the great eye blinked.
A silent message passed from Atvar H’sial to Louis Nenda: This being seems unaware of his own pheromones. I can read him. He recognizes you, and Rebka was a fool to mention that you are in his party. This may cost us.
“And now, Captain,” said Dulcimer, “might I be asking where it is that you want to be taken?”
“To the Torvil Anfract.”
The great eye blinked again and rolled toward Louis Nenda. “The Anfract! Ah, sir, that’s a bit different from what I was given to suppose. Now, if you’d told me at the first that you were wanting to visit the Anfract—”
“You don’t know the region?” Rebka asked.
“Ah, and did I say that, Captain?” The scaly head nodded in reproof. “I’ve been there dozens of times, I know it like I know the end of my own tail. But it’s a dangerous place, sir. Great walloping space anomalies, naked singularities, Planck’s-constant changes, and warps and woofs that have space-time ringing like a bell, or twisted and running crossways…” The Polypheme shivered, with a spiraling ripple of muscle that ran from the tip of his tail up to the top of his head. “Why would you ever want to go to place like the Anfract, Captain?”
“We have to.” Rebka glanced at Louis Nenda, who was standing with an unreadable expression. They had not discussed just how much the Polypheme would be told. “We have to go there because there are living Zardalu in the spiral arm. And we think they must be hiding deep within the Anfract.”
“Zardalu!” The croak rose an octave. “Zardalu in the Anfract! If you’d excuse old Dulcimer, sirs, for just one minute, while I check something…”
The middle arm was reaching into the pink corset, pulling out a little octahedron and holding it up to the bulging gray eye. There was a lon
g silence while the Polypheme peered into its depths, then he sighed and shivered again, this time from head to tail.
“I’m sorry, sirs, but I don’t know as I can help. Not in the Anfract. Not if there might be Zardalu there. I see great danger — and there’s death in the crystal.”
He is lying, Atvar H’sial told Nenda silently. He shivers, but there is no emanation of fear.
Louis Nenda moved closer to the Cecropian. Rebka’s telling him about the Zardalu, he replied.
Then Dulcimer does not believe it. He is convinced that the Zardalu are long-gone from the spiral arm.
“But see for yourself, in the Vision Crystal.” The Polypheme was holding the green octahedron out to Hans Rebka. “Behold violence, sir, and death.”
The inside of the crystal had turned from a uniform translucent green to a turbulent cloud of black. As it cleared, a scene grew within it. A tiny Dulcimer facsimile was struggling in the middle of a dozen looming attackers, each one too dark and rapidly-moving to reveal any details as to identities.
“Well, if you can’t help us, I guess that’s that.” Rebka nodded causally, handed the octahedron back to the Polypheme, and began to turn away. “I’m afraid we’ll have to look elsewhere for a pilot. It’s a pity, because I’m sure you’re the best. But when you can’t get the best, you have to settle for second best.”
“Now, just a second, Captain.” The five little arms jerked out of their slings all at once, and the Polypheme bobbed taller on his coiled tail. “Don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t say as how I couldn’t be your pilot, or even as I wouldn’t be your pilot. All I’m saying is, I see exceptional danger in the Anfract. And danger calls for something different from your usual run-of-the-arm contract.”
“What do you have in mind?” Rebka was still as casual as could be.
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