Resurgence hu-5

by Charles Sheffield

  Louis Nenda glanced at the clock in his master suite. He wasn’t about to say so to his partner, but maybe Atvar H’sial wasn’t such a genius after all. The day on Pompadour was a long one. Where Claudius and Sinara arrived on the planetary surface it would have been early morning. Now it would be past midnight. Somewhere, somehow, the odd couple had spent a long day and a long evening.

  What the devil were they doing?

  Louis sat restless at the round table, with its finely patterned surface. In the kitchen, Kallik had been unobtrusively busy. As always, she was sensitive to Nenda’s moods.

  The Hymenopt entered carrying a covered bowl. “They will surely return, Master Nenda. There is no need to fear for their safety. I hope that this meets with your approval.”

  Louis knew that it would. With her refined senses, Kallik was a superb cook. He removed the cover and nodded his appreciation. There was no point in telling Kallik that she had it all wrong. If Claudius did something stupid and got himself snuffed down on Pompadour, Louis wouldn’t grieve for a second. But then they would be back to the search for a navigator. Anything you found down on Pompadour was likely to be the dregs.

  Louis ate slowly and steadily. No matter where you were, no matter what was happening, it was a rule of life: Eat, or be eaten. He suspected that Kallik had included in the dish before him a hundred delicate flavors of which he was unaware. And one flavor of which he became steadily more aware as he continued to eat. Kallik worried about her master’s tense condition. She had added a few drops of one of the many secretions that a Hymenopt’s poison sac could produce. They ranged at her will from a lethal neurotoxic poison, to anesthetic, to tranquillizer. What Louis tasted now was close to the last of those, with some new and subtle variation.

  Louis could still worry—Where the hell were they?—but he was becoming drowsy and relaxed. He finished the bowl and drank with some suspicion the contents of the tall glass that accompanied the food. He was no connoisseur of fine wines. When you had been raised to regard muddy water as a treat, you tended not to be picky. But the concoction that Kallik had prepared tasted unusually pleasant.

  Louis ran his hand over the fine-carved table top. Carved was the wrong word. It was actually chewed into those distinctive patterns by the worker-termites of Llandiver. He could never go back there, of course, not after what had happened. If he lost this table, he would never find another like it. As Kallik crept in to clear the dishes, Louis wandered through to his bedroom.

  When you lived your whole life aboard a ship—or would, if only people would leave you in peace—you indulged your personal preferences. The Have-It-All possessed weapons that would make most military captains drool, but there was no sign of any of that here. Louis slept on a bed three meters long and three meters wide. No one would ever call it soft, but most of the time he slept in low gravity or no gravity, where that wasn’t an issue.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his boots. He yawned, slowly stripped down to his shorts, and lay back with his head on the pillow. He scratched his hairy belly. Where the hell were they? And if they didn’t show, where in this godawful place would he find another navigator? Although you had to hate anything as slimy and supercilious as Claudius, there was no doubt that the Polypheme knew what he was doing. To everyone else on the Have-It-All, travel in the Sag Arm was a mystery.

  He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  On the water-world of Pluvial, where a day without rain came once in a thousand years, Louis had encountered several of the native Cetomorphs. He rather admired those marine intelligences, and certainly he envied one of their abilities. They slept with half of their brain at a time; the other half remained awake and available for discussion and action. After a while the halves were ready to swap roles and the sleeping side awoke.

  Louis had asked them to teach him the trick. It turned out to be impossible. The best that he could manage was a light trance, in which he was neither asleep nor awake, but sensitive to all external stimuli.

  He had been in that state for the past several hours, until finally he heard with drowsy satisfaction the far-off but distinctive sound of the pinnace docking with the Have-It-All. He had no doubt that Sinara and Claudius were the people aboard, because the ship’s security system would not allow anyone lacking correct identification within a thousand kilometers.

  He would give Sinara a good chewing-out for failing to call in and tell Louis what they had been up to, but that could wait until morning.

  The other noise began five minutes after the docking ended. It was much less familiar. Not at all familiar, in fact. It sounded like two people, singing raucously and off-key.

  Louis rolled off the bed and padded toward the door. He felt naked without his boots, but the condition of the ship came first. As he left the master suite and stepped into the dark hallway that led aft, something fell against his chest. It giggled and said, “Oops!”

  He called for lights. Sinara Bellstock stood in front of him, although stood was hardly the right word. Her arms were around his neck, and her face pushed close against his chest. She made a strange questioning sound and pulled one hand back to run her fingers over the pits and nodules of his pheromonal augment.

  “Mmm,” she said. “Nice and fuzzy. Never saw one of these before.” She leaned close and sniffed his chest. “Interesting smell. I like that.”

  He pushed her away, trying to avoid contact with bare flesh. That wasn’t easy, because she was wearing about half as much clothing as when she left the Have-It-All.

  “What happened to you?” But he knew the answer. Sinara was drunk, and on something far stronger than alcohol.

  “Happened? Happened? Nothing happened. Went down to Pompadour, keep an eye on Claudius. Thaswhat I did, Mr. Fuzzy. He showed me all over—all over the place. Had a real good time. Haven’t had a time like that since . . . since . . . I don’t know. Never had a good time like that. Real good time. Real, real good time.”

  Her face was against his chest again, and he was supporting half her weight.

  “He took you to some dive, didn’t he? Got you stoned. Did you know what was going on?”

  He wasn’t sure she knew what was going on now, until she raised her head, frowned up at him, and said, “Course I knew. Met aliens—lots and lots of aliens. Treated me real nice. Wanted to have sex with me, some of ’em—Claudius too. He said, ’til you have sex with a Chism Polypheme you don’t know what sex is.”

  “I bet. You—er—you didn’t, did you?”

  “With Mr. Wriggly? Of course not. Be like having sex with a live corkscrew. Didn’t have sex with any of ’em. Told ’em the truth.” Sinara was weaving patterns with her right index finger around Louis’s navel. “Told ’em they didn’t have a chance. I was saving myself for my heart’s desire, Mr. Fuzzy, back on the Have-It-All.”

  The notion of being anyone’s heart’s desire was utterly alien to Louis. It took him a few seconds to realize that this was an open invitation, and one that he badly needed. He had been without a woman for an awful long time. The fact that Sinara was smashed out of her mind and might regret this tomorrow was no concern of his. The fact that Atvar H’sial would claim that her worst suspicions had been realized did not matter. What stopped Louis was no concept of morality or post-coital criticisms, but an awful thought. “Claudius got you this way, but what about him? He didn’t go to any radiation hot spots, did he?”

  “Dunno.” Sinara frowned and went cross-eyed with the effort to think. “Lessee. I remember some names of the places we went. The Solar Plexus, Roentgen’s Rendezvous, the Gamma Grille, Sunbathers’ Bar, the X-rayted . . . I’m missing some of ’em, there were at least five more. What you doing? Don’t go without me!”

  Louis was trying to move past her and head for the aft part of the ship. She had her arms around him and held on, so she was towed along complaining at waist-level behind him.

  “Claudius,” he said over his shoulder. “Where did you leave him on the ship
?”

  “Don’t know. Said he had work to do. I wasn’t interested in wriggly old Claudius. Did you know, he’s totally hairless? I like hair. Like yours. Did anyone ever tell you that you have a cute ass? Oof!”

  Her face had banged hard into Nenda’s muscular rear, because he had frozen at the door of the aft control cabin. Claudius sat in the control chair. Every inch of visible skin bore the luminous apple-green that showed the Chism Polypheme to be baked to a turn.

  “Claudius!”

  “Yes?” The Polypheme turned. His five hands were flying over the controls so fast that Louis could not make out the individual movements. “Ah, it’s you, Captain. We’re toasty-warm and ready to go. On our way. Shipshape and Bristol fashion. Up anchor, splice the mainbrace, souse the herring and split the difference. Space reefs and space sounders, I spit on ’em. Marglot, here we come.”

  “Claudius, don’t do it! Not ’til you’re off the boil.”

  But Louis was too late. Inside him he could feel the multidimensional twists and turns that went with a Bose entry. Outside him, Sinara was busy with the personal explorations of his anatomy that normally preceded entry of a different kind.

  The combination was certainly a first. Louis resigned himself to whatever came next. The Have-It-All was making a Bose transition, while at the same time Sinara continued to satisfy her prurient curiosity. Where either of them would finish up was anyone’s guess.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Marglottas?

  Guardian of Travel had promised a transit to another world, but that long-abandoned being had offered no guarantees as to how much time the passage might take, or how it would feel.

  Darya was drowning. Her eyes, mouth, nose, and lungs were filled with thick viscous mud. The suffocation had gone on forever, long past the point where she must be dead.

  She tried to breathe, tried to cough, tried to scream—and could do none of them. After several lifetimes of misery, a new discomfort was added. Her body was now being extruded, forced through a tube far too narrow to admit it. She was changing shape, transformed by remorseless pressure to a long, pale worm. The agony of breathlessness was nothing compared to this.

  And then, without warning, the pain ended. Darya felt a final moment of compression and rapid release, as though her body was being expelled like a cork from a bottle. Suddenly she was curled into a fetal position and lying on something soft. Her lungs and eyes were clear. She could breathe and see.

  She sat up, but had to wait until a wave of nausea passed. She looked down at her suit, convinced that it must be coated with thick mud. But the outside was spotless, cleaner than ever before, as though the transit had removed every trace of dust and grime.

  As she stood up, still unsteady on her feet, the ground a couple of meters from her began to boil and seethe. She backed away. A dark bubble was pushing its way out of the quaking earth. It grew steadily until it reared to twice Darya’s height, then suddenly burst and vanished. Left behind where the bubble had emerged from the ground lay two still forms.

  As Darya stepped cautiously toward them, one sat up. It said, “Stone me. I wouldn’t call that first-class travel. But I guess we weren’t promised anything more than a transit. Ben? Are you all right?”

  It was Hans Rebka, shuffling on hands and knees across to the other suited figure.

  Ben Blesh said, like someone in a dream, “I don’t seem to be dead. That’s a surprise. But I can’t sit up, and I can’t move my arms.”

  “Let me take a look.” Hans turned to Darya, as casual as if this sort of thing happened every day. “Give me a hand, would you?”

  Darya moved behind Ben as Hans lifted him, and held him in a sitting position. “Where are we, Hans?”

  “Lord knows. I wonder if we’re even in the same universe as we were. First things first, though. According to my suit’s sensors, wherever we are, it has breathable air. That’s good. We can remove our suits.”

  “Wouldn’t it be safer to keep them on?”

  “For you and me, it might. But Ben’s has to come off.”

  “Why me?” Ben was trying, and failing, to sit up without assistance. “I thought my suit was feeding me painkillers.”

  “It was. It is. That’s part of the problem. The pain that we felt during the transit was all psychological, but your suit didn’t know that. It decided you were being injured worse and worse every minute, so it upped the dosage of analgesics to blot out your discomfort. That’s why you can’t move. You’ve been overdosed. Sit still. I have to get you out of there and reset the levels.”

  As Hans eased Ben out of his suit, Darya knew that she could do little to help. Hans was an expert troubleshooter. She was at best an expert trouble-finder. He had opened their visors. She did the same and took her first breath of alien air. It was hot, humid, and musky.

  She stared about her. Guardian of Travel, by accident or design, had dumped them out halfway down a long, smooth incline. At the bottom, a couple of kilometers away, she thought she saw the glint of water. On the other side of the river, if that’s what it was, the ground rose away to another hillside. More significant, perhaps, was another feature. Running alongside and beyond the water, straight and flat, a smooth gray ribbon suggested a stone or gravel road.

  Darya swiveled her open faceplate to a position where she could read its built-in sensors. No radio signals registered on any frequency. The instruments showed eighty-five percent of a standard gravity and a slightly richer fraction of oxygen. Those accounted for the light and slightly light-headed feeling. Above her head, a greenish-yellow light filtered through continuous cloud cover. It was much stronger far off to one side. Either they had arrived not long after dawn, or soon it would be night.

  She said to Hans, “Anything I can do to help?” And, when he shook his head, “Then I think I’ll walk a little way down the hill. Seems like there might be a road at the bottom. It would be nice to meet something we can learn to talk to, and find out where we are.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. Not the best way of putting it, considering what we’ve just been through. But do you notice something odd about this place?”

  “Hans, everything is odd.”

  “All right, then, something here is odder than any place has a right to be. You’ve visited a bunch of different planets. Did you ever hear of one with plant life, and no animals?”

  “Never.”

  “Look around you. Not a beetle, not a bird, not a bat, not a butterfly. No little critters wriggling through the undergrowth, to escape or take a closer look at us. Where are they?”

  “Maybe we’re in the wrong location for animals.”

  “Could be. But this sure feels like it ought to be the right location. Warmth, water, soil, plenty of light, lots of plants—what more could an animal ask?” Hans bent again over Ben, who was now unconscious. “Damn these over-eager suits. They’re marvels compared with anything I ever saw before, but they do too good a job making sure the person inside doesn’t feel uncomfortable. I’ve got to get him out or he may never wake up. You go ahead. Take a look around. Maybe you can figure out where the animals went.”

  Until Hans started talking about animals, Darya had been feeling quite good about things. Against all odds the three of them had escaped from the deadly surface and desolate center of Iceworld. They were on a planet comfortably able to support life, and the road by the river was evidence that it also supported intelligence.

  Hans must be wrong. A planet didn’t need to have animals on the surface. A thriving biosphere could be maintained very well by creatures that lived below ground, feeding on the roots of plants that grew in the warmth and light above.

  She was walking over a layer of sturdy greenery that crackled slightly with each step. Every forty or fifty meters a dense clump of a different growth sprang up much taller, some reaching as high as Darya’s head. She changed her path toward the water so that she could approach one of them. She closed her faceplate as she came closer. It was unlikely th
at she would run into anything dangerous, but there was no point in taking risks, Anything that could chew a way in through the ultra-tough material of her suit, with its instant sealing compounds and multi-layered structure, would more than earn a meal.

  The growths had the shape of irregular cones with truncated tops. A green layer of overlapping scales, each about as big as Darya’s hand, formed the outer layer. She pushed one out of the way to examine the interior. It was too dark to make out details until she used the headlight on her suit. She peered in, flinched, and took a step backward. The green scale fell into its original position to cover the opening.

  Darya stood frozen for a second or two, then realized that she must take another look. Maybe Hans’s words had made her imagine things that weren’t there. This time she moved the green scale aside and held the light steady. The cone-growth had a yellow axis running up its middle. Five multi-legged objects hung suspended there. Darya thought at first that they were living creatures, and she hesitated to touch one; but they did not move. Finally she found the nerve to reach out her gloved hand and pluck one away from the plant’s central bole.

  It was dark brown and about the length of her forearm. And it was dead. Not just dead but mummified, so it appeared almost as it must have been in life. She turned it. Two big compound eyes sat on either side of a fanged maw. They seemed to stare accusingly at Darya.

  So Hans was wrong. There were animals. She did not find comfort in that fact. She slipped the little creature into an outside pocket of her suit and continued downhill toward the stream.

  The water was clear and swift-flowing over a bed of gravel and fist-sized rocks. Darya looked closely, but saw nothing living. The water moved, and that was all. She waded carefully across and kept stepping forward until she came to the gray strip.

  It was a road, no doubt about that, and it had been kept in good condition. A pile of stone by the roadside about two hundred meters away was an obvious source of materials for regular maintenance.