Transcendence hu-3

by Charles Sheffield

  “The earlier ships didn’t have a good reason to spend a lot of time here,” he went on. “They didn’t expect to find anything special inside, so they didn’t do a systematic search for a way in. But we know there’s something in there.”

  “And if it’s the Zardalu cladeworld,” Louis Nenda added, “we also know there has to be a way in and a way out, and it can’t be a too difficult way. All we have to do is find it.”

  All we have to do.

  Sure. All we have to do is something no exploring ship ever did before. Darya added another item to the list of common characteristics of Rebka and Nenda: irrational optimism. But it made no difference what she thought — already they were getting down to details.

  “Can’t take the Erebus,” Rebka was saying. “That’s our lifeline home.”

  “And it can’t even land,” Nenda added. His glance at Julian Graves could not be missed.

  “On the first look that’s no problem,” Rebka said. “Let’s agree to one thing, before we go any further: whatever and whoever goes, no one even thinks of landing. If there’s planets down there, you take a good look from a safe distance. Then you come back here and report. As for whether the ship we use is the Indulgence or the seedship, I vote seedship — it’s smaller and more agile.” He paused. “And more expendable.”

  “And talking of lifelines,” Nenda added, “Atvar H’sial points out that even the Erebus is not much use without Dulcimer to pilot it. He ought to stay outside, too—”

  “He certainly ought,” Dulcimer said. The Polypheme was rolling his eye nervously at the flickering sphere outside. He apparently did not like the look of it.

  “ — so who flies the seedship and looks for a way in past the singularities?” Nenda finished.

  “I do,” said Rebka.

  “But I am most expendable.” J’merlia spoke for the first time since they entered the Anfract.

  “Kallik and I know the Anfract internal geometry best,” Darya said.

  “But I can maintain the most detailed record of events,” said E.C. Tally.

  Deadlock. Everyone except Dulcimer seemed determined to be on the seedship, which held, at a squeeze, four or five. The argument went on until Julian Graves, who had so far said nothing, shouted everyone down in his hoarse, cracking bass. “Quiet! I will make the assignment. Let me remind all of you that the Erebus is my ship, and that I organized this expedition.”

  It’s my bat, Darya thought. And it’s my ball, and if you don’t go along with my rules you can’t play. My god, that’s what it is to them. They’re all crazy, and to them it’s just a game.

  “Captain Rebka, Louis Nenda, Atvar H’sial, J’merlia, and Kallik will fly on the seedship,” Graves went on. He glared the group to silence. “And Dulcimer, Professor Lang, and E.C. Tally will stay on the Erebus.” He paused. “And I — I must stay here also.”

  There was a curious diffidence and uneasiness in his last words.

  “But I think—” Darya began.

  “I know you do.” Graves cut her off. “You want to go. But someone has to stay.”

  That had not been Darya’s point. She was going to say that it was asking for trouble, putting Rebka and Nenda together in one group. She glanced across at the two men, but Rebka was distracted, staring in puzzlement at Graves. Julian Graves himself, with the uncanny empathy of a councilor, somehow picked up Darya’s thought and read it correctly.

  “We may need several individuals oriented to fast action on the seedship,” he said. “However, to avoid potential conflicts let it be clear that Captain Rebka will lead that group unless he becomes incapacitated. In which case Louis Nenda will take over.”

  Darya half expected Nenda to flare up, but all he did was shrug and say thoughtfully, “Good thinkin’. It’s about time the action group had somethin’ to do. Keep the academic types all together back here, an’ mebbe the rest of us—”

  “Academic types! Of all the nerve…” After the last year, Darya found such a description of herself totally ludicrous. And then she saw that Nenda was grinning at the way she had taken the bait.

  “You may get your chance anyway, Darya,” Hans Rebka said. “Once we know the way in we’ll relay it back to you. Keep the Indulgence ready in case we have problems and need you to come through and collect us. But don’t start worrying until you haven’t heard from us in three days. We may need that long before we can send you a drone.”

  He started to lead the seedship group out of the control chamber. “One other thing.” He turned back as he reached the exit. “Keep the Erebus engines powered up, too, all the time, and be ready to leave. And if you get a call from us and we tell you to run for it, don’t try to argue with us or wait to hear details. Go. Get out of the Anfract and into free-space, as fast as you can.”

  Dulcimer was coiled in the seat next to Darya. He turned his slate-gray monocular to her. “Fly away and leave them? I can see that there may be perils for the seedship in passing through the singularities — especially without the services of the spiral arm’s master pilot. But what can they be expecting to find within the singularities, dangerous to us back here on the Erebus?”

  “Zardalu.” Darya returned the stare. “You still don’t believe they’re real, do you, even after everything we’ve told you? They are, though. Cheer up, Dulcimer. Once we find them, according to your contract you’re entitled to twelve percent.”

  The great lidded orb blinked. If Darya had known how to read his expressions she would have recognized a scowl on the Polypheme’s face. Zardalu, indeed! And she had referred to his twelve percent far too glibly. She was taunting him! How would he know what they found on Genizee — or how much they would stow away, to recover when he was no longer around to claim his share — if he was not with them?

  Dulcimer knew when someone was trying to pull something over on him. Darya Lang could say what she liked about living Zardalu, the original bogeymen of the spiral arm, but he was sure that was all nonsense. The Zardalu had been wiped out to the last land-cephalopod, eleven thousand years before.

  Dulcimer realized how he’d been had. They all talked dangers, and being ready to fly for your life, just so that Dulcimer would not want to go into the singularities.

  And it had worked! They had caught him.

  Well, you fool me once, shame on you. You fool me twice, shame on me. They would not trick him so easily again. The next time anyone went looking for Genizee — or Zardalu! Dulcimer sniggered to himself — he certainly intended to be with them.

  Chapter Nine: Genizee

  The seedship was making progress.

  Slow progress. It had penetrated the sphere of the first singularity through a narrow line vortex that shimmered threateningly on all sides, and now it was creeping along the outer shell of the second, cautious as bureaucracy.

  Hans Rebka sat in the pilot’s seat, deep in thought, and watched the ghostly traces of distorted space-time revealed on the displays. There was little else to look at. Whatever might be hidden within the shroud of singularities, its nature could not be discerned from their present position. It had not been his decision as to who would travel on the seedship, but he realized he was glad that neither Darya Lang nor Julian Graves was aboard. They would be going mad at the slow pace, chafing at the delays, pointing out the absence of apparent danger, pushing him to speed up.

  He would have refused, of course. If Hans Rebka had been asked for his basic philosophy, he would have denied that he had any. But the nearest thing to it was his profound conviction that the secret to everything was timing.

  Sometimes one acted instantly, so fast that there seemed no time for any thought at all. On other occasions one took forever, hesitating for no apparent reason, pondering even the most seemingly trivial decision. Picking the right pace was the secret of survival.

  Now he was crawling. He did not know why, but it did not occur to him to speed up. There had been no blue-egged robin’s nests in Rebka’s childhood, no idyllic years of maturing on a gard
en planet. His homeworld of Teufel offered no birthright but hardship. He and Darya Lang could not have been more different. And yet they shared one thing: the hidden voice that sometimes spoke from deep within the brain, asserting that things were not what they seemed, that something important was being overlooked.

  The voice was whispering to Rebka now. He had learned from experience that he could not afford to ignore it.

  As the seedship crept along a spiral path that promised to lead through the shell of another singularity, he probed for the source of his worry.

  The composition of the seedship’s crew?

  No. He did not trust Nenda or Atvar H’sial, but he did not doubt their competence — or their survival instincts. J’merlia and Kallik’s desire to be given orders, rather than acting independently, was a nuisance more than a threat. It would have been better if Dulcimer could have been on board and flying the seedship — Rebka knew he could not compete with the Chism Polypheme on the instinctual level where a great master pilot could operate. But it was even more important to have Dulcimer back on the Erebus, to take it out of the Anfract.

  Rebka had learned not to expect optimal solutions for anything. They existed in Darya Lang’s clean, austere world of intellectual problems, but reality was a lot messier. So he did not have the ideal seedship crew. Very well. One took the crew available and did with what one had to do.

  But that was not the problem that nagged at his subconscious. It did not have the right feel to it.

  Was the world inside the shell of singularities actually Genizee, and would the Zardalu be found there?

  He considered that question as the adaptive control system sensed a way through the next singularity and delicately began to guide them toward it. Rebka could override if he saw danger, but he had no information to prompt such action. His warning flags were all internal.

  It might be the planet Genizee inside there, or it might not. Either way, they were going in. Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn’t waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice — and live or die with whatever you had thrown.

  So his worry had to be arising from somewhere else. Something unusual that he had noticed, and lost when he was interrupted. Something…

  Rebka finally gave up the struggle. Whatever was troubling him refused to show itself. Experience told him that it was more likely to return if he stopped thinking about it for a while, and now there were other things to worry about. The ship had turned again and was crawling along a path that to Rebka’s eyes led only to a white, glowing wall. He tensed as they came closer. They were heading straight for that barrier of light.

  Should he override? If only human senses included a direct sensitivity to gravity waves…

  He forced himself to trust the ship’s sensors. They reached the wall of light. There was a faint shiver through the seedship’s structure, as though an invisible tide had swept along it, and then they were through.

  Right through. The innermost shell singularity was behind them. The front of the ship was suddenly illuminated by the marigold light of a dwarf star.

  Louis Nenda had been crowded into the rear of the seedship, deep in pheromonal conversation with Atvar H’sial. He squeezed quickly forward past the sixteen sprawled legs of J’merlia and Kallik, to stand crouched behind Rebka.

  “Planet!”

  Rebka shrugged. “We’ll know if there’s one in a few minutes.” Then he would release a tiny drone ship, designed to retrace their path from the Erebus and provide information of their arrival to the others waiting outside. Whatever happened, Julian Graves and Darya should be told that the singularities were navigable. Rebka ordered the onboard sensors to begin their scan of space around the orange-yellow sun, masking out the light of the star itself.

  “I wasn’t askin’, I was tellin’.” Nenda jerked his thumb to the display that showed the region behind the ship. “You can see the damn thing, naked eye, outa’ the rear port.”

  Rebka twisted in his seat. It was impossible — but it was true. The rear port showed the same blue-white world with its big companion moon that Darya Lang and Kallik had displayed, back on the Erebus. They were both in half-moon phase, no more than a few hundred thousand kilometers away. Large landmasses were already visible. Rebka turned on the high-resolution sensors to provide a close-up view.

  “Do you know the odds against this?” he asked. “We fly through the whole mess of singularities, we emerge at least a hundred and fifty million kilometers away from a star — and there’s a planet sitting right next to us, close enough to spit on.”

  “I know a good bit about odds.” Nenda’s voice was an expressionless growl. “This just don’t happen.”

  “You know what it means?”

  “It means we found Genizee. An’ it means you oughta get us the hell out of here. Fast. I hate welcomes.”

  Rebka was ahead of him. He had taken the controls of the seedship even before Louis Nenda spoke, to send them farther away from the planet. As the ship responded to Rebka’s command, high-resolution images of both planet and moon filled the screen.

  “Habitable.” Nenda’s curiosity was competing with his uneasiness. He was flanked by Kallik and J’merlia. Only Atvar H’sial, unable to see any of the displays, remained at the rear of the ship. “Five-thousand-kilometer radius. Spectrometers say plenty of oxygen, classifiers say eighteen percent land cover, forty percent water, forty-two percent swamps, imagers say three main continents, four mountain ranges but nothin’ higher than a kilometer, no polar caps. Wet world, warm world, flat world, plenty of vegetation. Looks like it could be rich.” His acquisitive instincts were awakening. “Wonder what it’s like down there.”

  Hans Rebka did not reply. For some reason his attention had been drawn not to the parent planet, but to the images of its captive moon. The view that Darya Lang and Kallik had provided on the Erebus was from a long distance, so that all he had seen then was a small round ball, gleaming like a matte sphere of pitted steel. Now that same ball filled the screen.

  His mind flew back to focus on Darya’s accelerated-time display, with the moon whirling around and the planet steady against a fixed background. And he realized what had been puzzling him then, below his threshold of awareness: any two freely-moving bodies — binary stars, or planet and moon, or anything else — revolved around their common center of gravity. For so large a satellite as this, that center of gravity would lie well outside the planet. So both bodies should have been moving against the more distant background, unless the moon had negligible mass, which would have to mean—

  He stared at the image filling the screen, and now he could see that the pits and nodules on its surface were regularly spaced, its curvature perfectly uniform.

  “Artificial! And negligible mass. Must be hollow!” The words burst out of him, though he knew that they would be meaningless to the others.

  No matter. Soon they would learn it for themselves. Part of the moon’s surface was beginning to open. A saffron beam of light speared from it to illuminate the seedship. Suddenly their direction of motion was changing.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Nenda was pushing forward, grabbing at the controls.

  Hans Rebka did not bother to stop him. It would make no difference. The ship’s drive was already at its maximum setting, and still they were going in the wrong direction. He stared out of the rear port. Instead of moving away from the moon and planet, they were being drawn toward it. And soon it was clear that this was more than a simple tractor beam, drawing them in to a rendezvous with the gleaming moon. Instead their trajectory was turning, under the combined force vector of the beam and the drive, taking them to a different direction in space.

  Rebka looked and extrapolated, with the unconscious skill of a longtime pilot. There was no doubt about
the result.

  Wonder what it’s like down there, Louis Nenda had said. They were going to find out, and very soon. Like it or not, the seedship was heading for a rendezvous with Genizee. All they could do was sit tight and pray for the long shot of a soft landing.

  Soft landing, or good-bye, life.

  He thought of Darya Lang and felt sorrow. If he had known that this was coming, he would have said a decent farewell to her before he left the Erebus.

  While Hans Rebka was remembering Darya and imagining their last good-bye, she was thinking of him and Louis Nenda in much less favorable terms.

  They were self-centered, overbearing bastards, both of them. She had tried to tell them that she might be on the brink of a major discovery. And what had they done? Brushed her aside as though she were nothing, then at the first chance dashed off in search of Genizee — which she and Kallik had found for them — leaving her behind to fester on the Erebus and endure the babbling of E.C. Tally and the groveling of Dulcimer.

  The Chism Polypheme was desperate to have another go at the power kernel. Julian Graves had ordered E.C. Tally not to release another radiation beam, so Darya was Dulcimer’s only hope. He pestered her constantly, ogling and smirking and offering her the unimaginable sexual delights that according to him only a mature Chism Polypheme could provide. If she would just crack open a kernel for him and let him soak in the beam for a few hours — a few minutes…

  Darya retreated to the observation bubble and locked herself in. All she sought was solitude, but once that was achieved her old instincts took over. She went back to her interrupted study of the Anfract.

  And once started, again she could not stop. With no Kallik to interrupt her work, she entered her own version of Dulcimer’s radiation high.

  Call it research addiction.

  There was nothing else remotely like it in the whole universe. The first long hours of learning, all apparently futile and unproductive. Then the inexplicable conviction that there was something hidden away in what you were studying, some unperceived reality just beyond reach. Then the creeping-skin sensation at the back of the neck — the lightning flash as a thousand isolated facts flew to arrange themselves into a pattern — the coherent picture that sprang into sharp focus. The bone-deep pleasure of other ideas, apparently unrelated, hurrying into position and becoming parts of the same whole.