Transcendence hu-3

by Charles Sheffield

  “Yeah. Then what?”

  “I left the c-cargo hold. I began to move along the corridor. And then — then—”

  “Get on with it!”

  “Then—” The sting had retracted, but now the little body was shaking in Nenda’s arms. “Then I saw J’merlia. S-standing in front of me. In the corridor that led to the control room.”

  “Kallik, you know that can’t be. J’merlia’s dead — you saw it happen.” But Louis Nenda’s eyes told a different story. He and Rebka exchanged looks. Impossible? Maybe. But from two quite independent sources?

  “It was J’merlia. There could be no mistake. It was his voice, as well as his appearance.” Kallik was steadying. She was a supremely logical being, and any offense to logic was especially troubling to her. But the explanation in human speech was restoring her natural modes of thought. “He was about twenty meters away from me, farther along this same corridor. He called out my name, and then he spoke to me. He told me that I must go at once to the control room, that Julian Graves was in need of help.” Kallik paused and stared at Rebka. “That is true, isn’t it? And then, while I was looking straight at J’merlia…”

  She stopped speaking. Every eye in her whole black circle of eyes dimmed and seemed to go out of focus at once. Nenda banged her down hard on the floor.

  “Don’t you go brain-dead on me again. Spit it out, Kallik. Right now, or I’ll scatter your guts all round the room.”

  Kallik shook her head. “I will say it, Master Nenda, as you command. But it is not possible. While I was staring at him, J’merlia vanished. He did not move, for I am faster than he and I would have seen and tracked any movement that he could make. I did not lose consciousness, either, not even for a moment, which was my first thought, because I was in midair, jumping toward him when he vanished. It could not be some trick of reflection, or some peculiar optical effect, because less than a second after he disappeared I stood in the spot where he had stood, and felt the difference in temperature of the floor where his legs had rested.” Kallik slumped down, all her own legs wide. “It was truly he. My friend J’merlia.”

  Rebka and Nenda stared at each other.

  “She’s not lying, you know,” Nenda muttered. He was talking more to himself than to Hans Rebka.

  “I know. That’s what I was afraid of. It would be a lot easier if she were.” Rebka forced himself away from snarling impossibilities and back to things he knew how to handle. “You realize that’s exactly what he said.” He jerked his thumb back toward the sick bay where Julian Graves lay. “According to him, J’merlia was the only one with him on the Erebus.”

  “Yeah. But we don’t have to believe that. We can check who’s here. At can sniff the central air supply, an’ if there’s anybody else on the ship she’ll get a trace of ’em. Hold a minute.” Nenda hurried off, back toward the control room.

  Neither man needed to spell out the rest: If no one but Graves and J’merlia had been on the ship, then where were Darya and the others? Almost certainly, on Genizee. Which meant that the ascent of the Indulgence had stranded them there.

  Hans Rebka did not wait for Nenda’s return. “Bring Master Nenda to the Indulgence as soon as he gets back from the control room,” he said. He did not ask Kallik, who was still splayed on the floor — he commanded her. He hated to treat her as a slave, when he had argued so strongly that she was not; but this was a time, if ever, when the ends justified the means. The Hymenopt simply nodded obedience, and Rebka went hurrying back to the scoutship.

  Kallik had done her job in the cargo hold. The Indulgence was waiting, power recharged and command sequences set, ready to return to space. Rebka went to the open hatch. He itched to fly straight out of the hold and back to the surface of Genizee, but first he had to be sure of the situation on board the Erebus.

  When Louis Nenda returned he was not alone. Atvar H’sial was right behind him, gliding through the corridors in twenty-meter leaps.

  “No worries,” Nenda said, in answer to Rebka’s unasked question. “Kallik’s keeping an eye out on the bridge. She’s actin’ up some ways, but she’ll be okay for a couple of minutes.”

  “What does Atvar H’sial say?”

  “Agrees with Julian Graves, and with Kallik. Not a sniff of anyone else on board — ’cept for J’merlia. An’ that one’s fading, At says, like he was here an’ then just left. Downright spooky. If I were the worryin’ kind, that’d be heavy on my mind.” Nenda had moved past Rebka through the open hatch of the Indulgence, and was examining the controls. “You ready, then?”

  “Ready?”

  “Ready to head back down to Genizee.”

  “I am. But you’re not going.”

  “You wanna bet on it? I’m goin’, or you got a big fight on your hands.”

  Rebka opened his mouth to protest and then changed his mind. If Nenda wanted danger, why stop him? He was a liar and self-serving crook, but he was also an extra brain and an extra pair of hands — and he was a proven survivor. “Fine. Get in, and hurry up. We’re going now.”

  But the Karelian human was glancing over his shoulder to the hulking figure of Atvar H’sial, poised behind Hans Rebka at the hatch. “Uh-oh. Get set for takeoff, Captain, but before we go I gotta have a quick word with At there an’ tell her what’s what.”

  “Louis Nenda.” The Cecropian’s pheromonal message was strong as he approached her, the overtones full of suspicion and possible reproach. “I can read you clearly. We are safe in space, but you propose to return to the planet Genizee. Explain your actions… or lose a partner.”

  “Explain. There’s nothin’ needs explainin’,” Nenda came close to the Cecropian and crouched under her dark-red body case. “Be reasonable, At. Rebka’s goin’, you see that, whether I do or not. We know there’s all sorts of goodies down there, an’ we know he’s too dumb to take ’em even if he gets the chance. Somebody has to go with him, see what can be had.”

  “Then I will go, too.”

  “You wanna leave Kallik an’ Graves in charge, without two ounces of sense between ’em? Somebody has to stay here an’ keep things rollin’ smooth.”

  “Then you can stay. I will go, in your place.”

  “Don’t be crazy. You and Rebka can’t say one word that the other understands. I hafta go.”

  “It is the human female, Darya Lang. You seek to succor her.”

  “Succor! No way. I don’t know the meaning of the word. At, you’re gettin’ a real obsession about that woman.”

  “One of us surely is.”

  “Well, it ain’t me.” Nenda bobbed out from beneath the carapace and started into the hatch. “At, you just gotta trust me.”

  The Cecropian moved slowly out of the way. “I see little choice. However, I have conditions. We have waited too long, and deviated far from our original objectives. I want a promise from you, Louis Nenda, here and now: that if I remain we will, as soon as possible after your return from Genizee, take possession of this ship for our own use. A safe path out of the Torvil Anfract is easy, according to Dulcimer — it is only the entry that is difficult and perilous. So you and I will leave the Erebus in this ship and return to Glister, where we will find your own ship, the Have-It-All. We have procrastinated long enough.”

  “Hey, I miss the Have-It-All as much as you do — more. You got a deal. Soon as I get back, we go.”

  “Just the two of us.”

  “Who else? Sure, just the two of us. Go pack your bags. I gotta be on my way, Rebka’s all ready an’ waitin’.” He cut off pheromonal transmission to show that the conversation was over, and hurried back inside the Indulgence.

  Hans Rebka was indeed waiting — but not for Louis Nenda. He was sitting at the controls and reentering an initializing sequence. His face showed total frustration. Nenda dropped into the seat next to him.

  “What’s the holdup? Let’s get outa here.”

  “I’d love to. If that would let me.” Rebka nodded to one of the displays. “I’m trying to open the conne
cting door to the outer hold. But the command set is being ignored.”

  “It shows the outer door won’t cycle. That means the lock’s in use.”

  “I know what it means — but that lock was empty when we came in through it.” Rebka was switching to a camera that should provide a view of the lock area. “So how could it be in use now?”

  Louis Nenda did not need to attempt an answer. While they watched, the air-pump sequence had ended. The outer lock now possessed a balancing atmosphere with the inner hold, and the door between the chambers could at last slide open. Both men stared at the scene shown on the displays.

  “It’s the seedship,” Nenda said. “How come it’s arrivin’ here now? Where’s it been all this time?” Before Hans Rebka could do anything to stop him Nenda ran back to the hatch, flipped it open, and within a second was free-falling through the open interlock door toward the smaller vessel.

  Rebka followed at a slower pace. He could fill in a line of logic, and it made almost complete sense. He and his party had gone to Genizee on the seedship, but on their return to their landing place it was not there. They had been forced to return on the Indulgence. Darya Lang’s party had gone to Genizee on the Indulgence, but it had gone when they needed it. So they must have managed to locate the missing seedship on Genizee’s surface, and were now returning in it.

  Almost complete sense. The mystery component was again J’merlia. He had vanished into a column of incandescent blue plasma on Genizee, and reappeared on the Erebus. But how had he come here, if not on the seedship?

  Louis Nenda was already over at the ship, cycling the lock. As soon as it was half-open he was squeezing through. Rebka followed, surprised at his own sense of foreboding.

  “Darya?” he said, as he emerged from the lock. If she was not there… But Louis Nenda was turning to him, and one glance at his face said that he did not have the news that Hans Rebka wanted to hear.

  “Not Darya,” Nenda said. “Only one person on board. I hope you got an explanation, Captain, because I know I don’t. Take a peek.”

  He moved to one side, so that Hans Rebka could see the seedship pilot’s seat. Lolling there, breathing but unconscious, was the angular stick-thin figure of J’merlia.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Hans Rebka could find no trace of a wound on J’merlia’s body. He had watched the Lo’tfian fling himself into that roaring pillar of plasma so hot that it had instantly seared off the pursuing Kallik’s leg. Now that wiry limb was just beginning to grow back, but on J’merlia’s whole body there was no slightest trace of burn marks.

  Rebka and Louis Nenda carried J’merlia back to the bridge of the Erebus. There Atvar H’sial was able to perform an untrasonic scan on the unconscious Lo’tfian’s body and confirm that his internal condition was apparently as intact as his exterior appearance. “And the brain seems to be no more damaged than the body,” the Cecropian said to Nenda. “The source of his unconsciousness remains a mystery. One suspects that it arises more from psychological than physical causes. Let me pursue that approach.”

  She crouched by J’merlia and began to send powerful arousal stimuli to him in the form of pheromonal emissions. Rebka, to whom Atvar H’sial’s message was nothing but a complicated sequence of odd and pungent odors, looked on for only a minute or two before he lost patience.

  “She can do that all she wants to,” he said to Louis Nenda, “but I’m not going to sit and sample the stinks. I’ve got to get down to the surface of Genizee. You come or stay, it’s all one to me.”

  Nenda glared at him, but he did not hesitate. When Rebka headed back to the Indulgence, Nenda was hurrying at his side. “I’ll tell you another thing,” he said, as they prepared to soar free of the Erebus for the first phase of descent from orbit. “J’merlia may not want to wake up, but At says he feels better to her than he did the last time she saw him. She says he’s all there now.”

  “What does that mean?” Rebka was aiming the scoutship for exactly the same spot on Genizee’s surface from which they had taken off, and only half his attention was on Louis Nenda. It was not just a question of navigation. At any moment he was half-expecting a saffron beam of light to spear out of the sky and carry them willy-nilly to some random place on the surface of Genizee. It had not happened so far, but they had a way to go before touchdown. He was losing height as fast as he dared.

  “Beats me.” Nenda could not hide his frustration. “I tried to get her to tell me what she meant, an’ she said you don’t explain things like that. If you don’t feel the difference in J’merlia, she says, you won’t know what she means even if she tells you.” He rubbed his pitted and noduled chest. “She comes up with that, after all I went through gettin’ this augment put in just so I could gab Cecropian!”

  The Indulgence was finally at two thousand meters and still descending fast. Already the screens revealed the familiar curve of the shoreline, with the spit of land to the north jutting out into blue water. Inland, the dark scars in a carpet of gray-green moss showed Hans Rebka just where the seedship and Dulcimer’s scoutship had landed. Those scars looked subtly different from when he had left. But how? He could not say. At seven hundred meters he took complete manual control and brought them in to hover over their previous landing site.

  “See anything?” His own eyes moved to the cluster of buildings where their party had first been trapped. Nothing had changed there. No sign of disturbance in the calm waters. It was Louis Nenda, scanning the broken masses of rock and scrubby vegetation a couple of hundred yards farther inland, who grunted and pointed.

  “There. Zardalu. Can’t see what they’re doin’ from here.”

  There were scores of them, clustered in a circular pattern around a dark chasm in the surface. They were in constant motion. Rebka flew the Indulgence across to hover directly overhead, where the downward display screens under high magnification showed upward-turning heads of midnight blue and staring cerulean eyes.

  “Full-size adults, most of that lot.” Nenda moved to the Indulgence’s weapons console. “Let’s give ’em somethin’ to think about.”

  “Careful!” Rebka warned. “We don’t know who else is down there in the middle of them.”

  “No worries. I’ll just tickle ’em a bit.” But Nenda selected a radiation frequency and intensity that would fatally burn a human in ten seconds. He projected it downward, choosing the spread so that it covered the whole group below them. There was an instant reaction. Zardalu jerked and jumped in pain, then fled in flurries of pale-blue tentacles across the shore, heading for the safety of the water.

  Nenda followed them with the radiation weapon, pouring it onto the stragglers. “Don’t die easy, do they?” he commented thoughtfully. He was burning them with a higher-intensity beam, yet every Zardalu managed to reach the water and swim strongly before plunging under. “Tough beggars, they eat up hard radiation. They’d be right at home with Dulcimer in the Sun Bar on Bridle Gap. Or maybe not. I guess they can take it, but they sure don’t seem to like it.”

  The last Zardalu had vanished underwater. Hans Rebka hesitated. The easy piece was over, but what now? Was it safe to land the Indulgence, even with its sophisticated weapons system? He had learned the hard way an old Phemus Circle lesson: It’s a poor civilization that can’t learn to defend against its own weapons. The trouble starts when you have to defend against somebody else’s.

  The last Zardalu Communion had at one time extended over a thousand worlds. They could not have maintained their dominion without something to help them.

  He brought the Indulgence to a hover thirty meters up, exactly above the scar in the moss left earlier by its mass. When all continued quiet, he cautiously lowered the ship to the surface. If Darya and any other survivors of her party were trying to escape from the surface of Genizee, there was no more logical place for them to seek. And if there were no survivors…

  That was a thought that Hans Rebka did not care to pursue.

  “Steady. Somethin’s going on.
” Nenda’s gruff voice interrupted his thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Dunno. But don’t you feel it? In the ship?”

  And Hans Rebka did. A minor tremor of the planetary surface, changing angles slightly and sometimes imparting a faint jitter to delicately balanced items of the ship’s interior. Rebka instinctively lifted the ship to hover a couple of feet clear of the mossy ground cover, but further action on his part was overwhelmed by another input.

  He had been watching the screens that displayed the seaward view, but now and again he switched his attention to one showing the land side. What he saw there filled him with strong and unfamiliar emotions.

  It took a second to recognize them. They were relief and joy.

  Running — staggering — across the uneven surface came Darya Lang. Right behind her was E.C. Tally, moving with the gait of a drunken sailor. And behind him, bounding along with a horde of dwarfed and apricot-colored young Zardalu snapping at his corkscrew tail, came a miserable, cucumber-green Dulcimer.

  At the rate Darya and the others were moving they would be at the scoutship in less than thirty seconds. That was wonderful, but Rebka had two problems. The Zardalu were gaining — fast. They might catch Darya and the other two before they reached the safety of the ship.

  And the shuddering of the Indulgence was growing. Accurate aiming of the weapons system to pick off the Zardalu was impossible.

  Lift to safety, with Darya and the others just seconds away? Or wait for them, and risk the ship?

  Hans Rebka placed his finger on the ascent control. Thirty yards to go, maybe ten seconds before they were inside the open hatch.

  The ship lurched. He stopped breathing.

  * * *

  Those high-pitched, excited squeaks were the thing that had changed the Eaters from awful concept to Darya’s worst reality.

  The voices of the baby and adolescent Zardalu were quite different from the clicks and whistles of the parents. They had come echoing along the tunnel behind Dulcimer, rapidly increasing in volume. With those in her ears, decision-making had moved from difficult to trivial.