Where did the road lead?
Darya stared to her left, then to her right. She saw no sign of buildings, but maybe a kilometer away some dark object stood on the road itself.
She turned on her suit radio. “Hans?”
“I hear you.”
“There are animals. I found them. Or at least, I found some dead ones. Now I’m across the stream and standing on a road. No buildings, but I see something else sitting on the road itself. It’s within walking distance. I thought I might take a look at it.”
“Might as well. There’s nothing for you to do back here. I fixed up Ben as best I can, but he’s still asleep. One thing, though. We don’t know how long the day is here, but it’s my impression that the sun is lower in the sky. Don’t stay away too long.”
Darya stared off to her left. The sun seemed to her to be in about the same position, though it was certainly darker. Rain clouds, maybe? If nothing else, the stream guaranteed a supply of drinking water.
She opened her faceplate. Even if the sun was going down, the air felt as hot as ever. She headed off in the opposite direction, away from the sun. Progress was much faster now that she was on a solid level surface. The dark object on the road grew steadily, transforming from a shapeless blob to a definite oval outline. It was a huge humpbacked body, supported on six thick limbs.
Could that be another dead animal, somehow frozen and mummified in the very act of walking?
As Darya came closer yet, she revised her idea of what she was seeing. Legs, yes, each one solid and thick, but this was no animal. It was a walking vehicle. The great “head” facing Darya contained a transparent window where you might expect eyes to be, allowing her to look through to the interior. Two shapes, pale-yellow and motionless, sat within. The still forms had a disturbing familiarity.
Darya kept walking. The whole front of the vehicle formed a single door. She located the handle, reached out, and swung it open.
A gust of warm air touched her face. It carried the smell of something old and rancid, but that was not what made her shiver. She recognized the creatures sitting lifeless on the two broad seats. She had seen them, or their relatives before—although never in life.
She slammed the door closed.
“Hans?” She could hear the tremble in her voice. “Hans?”
“Darya? Are you all right?”
“I’m not right at all. Hans, you won’t believe this, but we’re on Marglot. I’ve just seen some of the Marglotta. They are here in front of me. They are dead. I think they are all dead. We arrived here too late.”
* * *
Darya wanted Hans Rebka to see the walking vehicle and confirm her suspicions as to what she was seeing inside it. But there were two problems. Hans should not leave Ben Blesh alone until it was safe to do so; and Darya doubted her ability to navigate the six-legged walking vehicle off the road and up the hillside—even assuming that she overcame her squeamishness at pushing the mummified body out of the driver’s seat.
While she tried to decided what to do next, another factor entered. It started to rain. Great spherical drops as big as marbles drifted down from the warm and clouded sky. When one of them burst on the nose of Darya’s upturned face, she slammed shut her suit’s visor, jerked open the door of the car, and scrambled inside closing it behind her.
Her inspection of the Marglotta, made without touching the bodies, was suggestive but not conclusive. They seemed to have died instantly, and without any warning. The clawed paws of one of them rested on pedals and control bars. The other sat with a rounded dark-brown ball—food, perhaps?—raised halfway to its open mouth.
She said into her radio, “Hans, I don’t know what happened here. But whatever it was, it was quick. If it’s like this all over the planet, the Marglotta died fast and without any idea what was coming.”
“There’s no danger now, is there?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“I’m wondering where we are going to spend the night. The sun is lower, I’m sure of it, and the rain is coming down harder. It would be a major effort, but if I could carry Ben down there we could spend the night in comfort, inside the car and out of the rain.”
Darya decided she had to put her feelings about the dead Marglotta behind her. Even if Hans could carry Ben, what would that do to the other man’s injured body?
“Let me try something, Hans. Maybe I can work the car’s controls and get it walking.”
The hardest act was the first one. She had to lift one body out of the driver’s seat and place it in the rear of the car. The Marglotta were small, no more than a meter or so in height, so weight was no problem. But as she raised the driver’s body, the arms reaching for the controls snapped off. They were as brittle as long-dried twigs. Darya gritted her teeth, hoisted the body over the seat back, and laid it on the flat area behind. She squeezed into the driver’s place, trying to ignore the shrivelled corpse by her side.
The controls were simple enough, assuming that Marglotta thought processes in any way resembled those of humans. The condition of the vehicle’s power source was another matter. She had no idea how long it might have been sitting on the stony road unused, or even what the source of power might be. The technology level of the road and the vehicle suggested fossil fuel or a stored energy flywheel, rather than solar power, a fusion plant, or superconducting rings.
Had the vehicle been smart enough to switch itself off after it sat for a while without moving? Darya searched for a general power switch and located two candidates. The first operated the six articulated legs, lengthening them until Darya sat uncomfortably high above the road. She reversed that, restoring the car body to its original height. The second switch led to a hum and bone-rattling vibrations. It did not trouble Darya, but flakes of dried skin shook loose from the creature by her side and rustled down to coat the floor of the car.
Darya did not relish the prospect of driving while dead bodies disintegrated around her, but Hans Rebka had to see these things—or what was left of them by the time she got there.
Her hands and feet were on the same pedals and levers that the Marglotta had used. She experimented with them cautiously. They seemed simple enough. One for speed control, two of them for turning right or left, and one for reversing direction. She “walked” the car along the stony road, getting a feel for pace and movement. The rolling up-and-down gait of the vehicle was not unpleasant. Once you were used to it, the feeling was even soothing. Maximum speed was hardly more than a walk, though Darya knew she was ignorant of such things as gears and faster drive modes.
She continued along the stony road until she was level with the suited figures of Hans Rebka and Ben Blesh, then made a right-angle turn toward the hill.
Now came the tricky part. She had to guide the car across the fast-flowing stream, then negotiate the slope ahead of her.
It proved easier than expected. The car contained some kind of stabilizing device, which automatically shortened or lengthened the front and back legs so as to keep the inside always level.
The limited speed of the vehicle made her progress irritatingly slow, but within ten minutes Darya brought the car to a halt ten meters from where Hans and Ben were sitting. The faceplates of their suits were closed to keep out the rain, now pouring down torrentially.
They walked toward her. She was pleased to see that Ben was awake and moving almost normally, though he was holding his right arm close in to favor his broken ribs.
She opened the car’s wide front door and the two men scrambled in. Hans Rebka apparently experienced none of Darya’s reverence for the dead. He examined the Marglotta sitting in the passenger seat for a few seconds, and nodded. “You’re right. Just the way I remember the dead ones, back at Upside Miranda Port. Died the same way, I’d guess, though I don’t know how that could be. Well, there’s nothing we can do for them now.”
He unceremoniously lifted the second body and dumped it over the seat into the back of the car.
“This is
a lot better than spending the night outside. Darya, you keep the driver’s seat. Ben, the passenger seat is yours. I’ll make a place for myself in the back.”
“In with the bodies?”
He gave her a puzzled look. “That’s what I had in mind. Unless you think I ought to dump them outside? I wasn’t going to, because if we decide tomorrow that we’d like to dissect them, by that time the rain could have ruined the bodies completely. They’re falling to bits as it is.”
He sounded unbelievably cold and casual. Darya had to remind herself that there was another side to the man. In crises, he seemed able to suppress every trace of emotion. All was calm logic. Maybe that’s why he was such a good troubleshooter.
If you wanted empathy and feeling for others, you would take Julian Graves. If encyclopedic knowledge was the requirement, without much judgment to go with it, then E.C. Tally was the person of choice. If you needed someone who through long experience had a sense of Builder constructs and how they might and might not act, maybe you would turn to Darya herself. But if you were in such deep trouble that you thought you would never emerge alive, then you turned to Hans Rebka—and you hoped that sentiment and finer feelings would not interfere with the need for the split-second decisions and hard actions that survival demanded.
Ben was already in the passenger seat, his body turned a little to give him as much comfort as he could find. He needed real medical treatment, but he would not get it here. Hans was in the back. He was moving things around there, and Darya did not choose to turn her head and find out what they were.
She stared straight ahead, out through the car’s forward window. The sun was lower yet, dipping toward the horizon with what seemed like infinite slowness. The day on Marglot was very long, and they had to be prepared to endure an equally long night.
The rain fell steadily, soaking into the springy vegetation and the tall conical growths that hid the small mummified animals. The hillside was as bleak a prospect as Darya had ever seen. Tonight they would rest as best they could, but tomorrow they must begin to ask and answer a different question: Was it possible for humans to survive on Marglot, as the food supplies of their suits ran out?
Darya’s brain felt turned off. She was not thinking about anything at all as she stared at the hillside ahead. She saw nothing and was expecting to see nothing, when her trance was broken by a change in the light outside. A vertical shaft of illumination was forming, as though a second sun shone through a rift in the clouds to produce a bright column of light. The shaft was about four meters across, and it struck the ground where Darya, Hans, and Ben had been expelled from it.
“Hans!”
“What?” Incredibly, his voice sounded as though she had wakened him from sleep.
“Look outside. In front of the car. Something’s happening.”
“Huh?” But he was sitting up, leaning over Darya’s shoulder. “That wasn’t there ten minutes ago.”
“No. I saw it forming. What is it, Hans?”
“I don’t know. But it’s changing.”
The column of light no longer ran from heaven to earth. Its upper end was fading, even as the lower part lifted, solidified, and took on a definite shape. It formed a glowing oval whose lower end hung three meters or so above the soaked earth. As they watched it changed further, into a perfect sphere that slowly drifted downward.
It was three meters above the wet vegetation—two meters, one meter, and still descending. As the lowest point made contact with the wet plants, the sphere emitted a flash of light so bright that the photosensitive faceplates of the suits instantly darkened to protect their eyes.
When they could see again the bright sphere had disappeared. But it had not vanished without leaving a trace. Where the sphere had touched down, something remained. Three somethings. Three suited human figures. Three people, back to back, sitting down on the wet hillside with legs outstretched in front of them.
As Darya watched in disbelief, one figure climbed slowly to its feet. It was facing away from the car, so she could not see into the faceplate of the suit. The person within would not at once see her.
A voice said, “Well, I suppose you’d have to say that this is an improvement. When you have been nowhere at all, and sitting under a force of two and a half gees while you were nowhere, almost anywhere else qualifies as better. But as to why we were brought here . . . ”
The words tailed off, but Darya did not need to hear more. Only one person in the Sagittarius Arm possessed that deep, hollow voice. The man standing with his back to the car was Julian Graves.
And with him, scrambling to their feet with expressions on their faces that suggested they were as surprised as Darya, were two others whom Darya recognized. There was no question that they were Torran Veck and Teri Dahl.
Which left only the biggest question of all. It was the one asked by Julian Graves of himself and his companions, but it applied equally well to Darya, Hans, and Ben: Why had they been brought here?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Planning a landing
The interior of the Have-It-All had become a place of hushed conversations and secret meetings. Kallik, J’merlia, and Archimedes sat huddled—in so far as anyone could huddle with a creature the size of Archimedes—in the drive room of the ship.
“Master Nenda is very angry.” Kallik spoke with the authority of one who knows.
“Does he blame us?” J’merlia asked. Archimedes added, “Do you think he will disembowel me?”
Kallik looked puzzled. “Is there any reason why he should?”
“It is the standard way of registering disapproval among the Zardalu.”
“I would advise you not to point this out to Master Nenda. In any case, he is not angry with you, or with any one of us.” Kallik’s rings of bright eyes glanced in all directions to be sure that no one was approaching. “He blames Claudius, and to a lesser extent Sinara Bellstock.”
“But why?” Archimedes’s speech was improving fast, although he was still more comfortable with the master-slave language of the Zardalu. “Are we not in orbit around Marglot, as we wished to be? Kallik, it was your assurance that we had achieved our correct destination.”
“That is true. At least, we are orbiting a world with four poles. I cannot imagine many such specimens are to be found in the whole galaxy, still less in a small region of the Sag Arm.”
“Kallik, I see no poles. Yet you assert that my eyes are superior to those of everyone else on board.”
“What do you expect, pointers sticking out of the ground with labels on them? Archimedes, observe. The world below shows a clear demarcation into two hemispheres. There is a daylight side facing the sun, and another side which is in night. The day-night terminator constantly advances, since the world rotates. There is a fixed axis of rotation, and two poles are located at the ends of that axis. Let us call them, for convenience and in accordance with common usage, the North Pole and the South Pole. However, there is also a second division into hemispheres unrelated to sun position. Note that we have one side of high albedo, a bright half which faces always away from the gas-giant planet around which the planet orbits. Lacking a name, we will for the sake of convenience name that gas-giant world as M-2. Then we also have a less bright though sometimes cloud-covered side, always facing toward M-2.”
“I see those. But I do not understand their meaning.”
“You require training in simple orbital mechanics. Perhaps, on some other occasion, there will be time for such a thing. Meanwhile, observe.” Kallik gestured to the screen showing the planet below. “The gas-giant world M-2 is hot, with a mean temperature of eight hundred degrees. Marglot—for I am convinced that this world is Marglot—revolves around M-2. It is tidally locked to it, so that the same face of Marglot is always presented in that direction. That hemisphere, of course, will be warm, and its center will logically be known as the Hot Pole. The other face never receives any heat from M-2, and precious little from the parent star. Its brighter appearance, as
spectral reflectance measurements confirm, derives from a surface covered with snow and ice. The center of that hemisphere, the coldest place on the planet, is the Cold Pole.”
“So you believe that we are exactly where we wish to be, at the world of the four poles. Why then is Master Nenda enraged at Claudius and at Sinara Bellstock?”
“Why, because they delayed us. Had we left Pompadour promptly, we would not be the last of the expedition to arrive. Thanks to Claudius and Sinara, we have been deprived of the possible advantages of getting here first.”
“Will Master Nenda disembowel Claudius and Sinara?”
“No. Could you perhaps cease this obsession with disemboweling?”
“I will try. But still I do not understand. When we first arrived, Master Nenda seemed pleased. He reported that there were no signal beacons from other ships, and therefore we were ahead of everyone else.”
“That was my fault.” J’merlia hung his narrow head in a human gesture of remorse. “I was operating the communications console, and I reported to my dominatrix, Atvar H’sial, that no ships’ transponders or signal beacons were active in this stellar system.”
“Was that a false statement?”
“No. But it was an insufficient one. I failed to search for the much weaker signals from individual suits, which transmit on different frequencies. To my shame, it was Master Nenda himself who thought to look for and discovered such suit signals, emanating from the surface of Marglot. Worse than that, all but one of the other members of the original expedition now appear to have found their way there. The signal from the suit of Lara Quistner alone is missing.”
“How can that be?” Archimedes stared out of the observation port, scanning the planet with his great luminous eyes as though an individual suit might be visible to him even from a distance of five hundred kilometers. “If they are on Marglot, they must somehow have been brought there. Yet you found no ships’ transponder or signal beacons. Kallik, where are the ships?”
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