“You ask me the same question that Master Nenda asked. To my shame, I could provide no answer. He is very angry.”
“With reason. We have failed him.” Archimedes wrapped his great midnight-blue tentacles protectively around his mid-section. “He will surely disembowel all of us. Perhaps he will gut Claudius and Sinara Bellstock first, but then it will be our turn. Kallik, you have worked longest for Master Nenda and you know him best. Please speak to him on our behalf. Seek to take the edge off his anger and impose on us a lesser penalty. My bowels are very dear to me.”
* * *
Louis was indeed angry. Angry at Claudius, who had made a Bose transition when his brains were fried to a crisp. In doing that the Polypheme had endangered Nenda’s precious Have-It-All, not to mention everyone inside it. Chism Polyphemes were all liars. You could not trust one when he swore that the navigators of his species practiced their art best when they were on a radiation high.
The Polypheme lay on the floor of the middle cargo hold, a limp and wailing mass of cucumber-green misery. He had, he swore, the worst hangover that any living being had ever endured. That generated no sympathy in Louis. He kicked Claudius hard on the back of his blubbery head as he left.
Louis was just as angry with Sinara Bellstock. What she had swallowed, sniffed, injected, or inserted while down on Pompadour was her business. But it was certainly Louis’s business when Sinara, after offering a display of physical affection so enthusiastic and vigorous that Louis was willing to keep going while the Have-It-All disintegrated around them, had suddenly and completely passed out.
Nothing could wake her. Louis could have continued and she wouldn’t even have noticed. But he had tried necrophilia before, and he didn’t like it.
He had rolled Sinara to her own cabin and left her there to sleep it off. Then he went to find his clothes, ready to roam the interior of the ship looking for something to kill.
That was when he became really angry. Not with Claudius, and not with Sinara. With Louis Nenda.
How had he so badly misjudged the rest of the crew of the Pride of Orion? Darya Lang, quite apart from being a sexy piece, understood the Builders and their works better than anybody. Hans Rebka was a weaselly little runt, but he had been in trouble often and always found a way out of it. Those two might well have hopped and wiggled their way to Marglot. They had headed off to the big dead world in the system where they first arrived, hoping to do just that.
But what about the other witless collection? What about Julian Graves, so stupid that he considered the life of a pea-brained Ditron as important as the life of a human being? What about dinglebrain E. Crimson Tally, who if he had been a human would have died twice already. As for the “survival specialists” . . .
Sinara was a romantic nympho who put pleasure ahead of everything. All right for fun, but for survival? And she was the best of them. But they had all, Ressess’tress knew how, beaten Louis, Atvar H’sial, and the Have-It-All to Marglot. Sure, one of them was missing, but she might pop up any time. Maybe she was underground. The rest were on the surface, six of them near the Hot Pole and the other—E.C. Tally, from the suit’s identification—sitting near the Hot Pole/Cold Pole equator.
How come Tally was so far from all the others? There was no evidence from the radio signals of a ship, pinnace, or aircar anywhere on Marglot. How had Tally traveled such a distance, many thousands of kilometers? Louis could think of only one answer. The Marglotta must have provided transportation. Here was something to make him madder yet. You responded to a call for help across thousands of lightyears, and when you were stupid enough to respond, they were sitting cozy at home and apparently doing fine.
Louis stormed off to find Atvar H’sial. The Cecropian was crouched at her ease before an instrument panel of her own devising.
“Have you been following all this?”
“To the best of my humble abilities.”
“At, modesty don’t become you.”
“I have also received a detailed briefing from Kallik, by way of J’merlia.”
“Then you know we’ve been screwed. We’re arrivin’ last of the party, and if we can take anything at all with Julian Graves watchin’, it will be scrapings.”
“You and I agree on the facts, Louis. However, we draw different conclusions.”
“At, they’re ahead of us and down there—every one of ’em.”
“Correct. Six in one location, the seventh in another. But through J’merlia, I commanded Archimedes, whose optical powers are amazing and perhaps even unparalleled, to seek movement on the cloud-free portions of Marglot. He reports numerous small moving objects, all on the frozen hemisphere, but has detected nothing that could be a substantial piece of airborne or ground transport equipment.”
“We’ve got our pinnace, At. We don’t need none of the Marglotta’s junk.”
“True. But Julian Graves and his cohorts need it. Without it, they are confined to a tiny portion of the planetary surface. All the rest—” Atvar H’sial waved an articulated limb toward the window. Marglot hung in the sky beyond it, although with the Cecropian’s echolocation vision she could only be inferring the looming presence of the planet from other sensors. “All the rest, Louis, is ours to explore and exploit.
“Consider the options. Are the Marglotta alive? Then we have responded to their call for help, and we are ready for their thanks and willing to begin negotiations—on our terms. Are the Marglotta dead? Then the whole of the planet, except for an insignificant area where the rest of our original party is located, is ours for the taking. We will of course rescue Julian Graves and the others and be prepared to receive their gratitude—eventually.”
* * *
There was no justice in the universe, and a man had no right to expect any. Louis had known that long before he was a man—before he was weaned, probably, though his memories didn’t go back that far.
Even so, it was never pleasant to have your nose rubbed in injustice one more time.
He was sitting in his own quarters, at his desk and working on the difficult question of the landing party, when Sinara walked in.
No, she didn’t walk in; she waltzed in. The laws of morning-after said that she should be feeling like hell and looking as green as Claudius. Instead she was rose pink and bright-eyed, with a spring in her step. The bottom of her mouth ought to feel as though bats without toilet-training had roosted all night on her upper palate. But when she said, “Good morning—and a great morning it is,” she leaned over and gave Louis a kiss on his unshaven cheek. Her breath was as sweet, fresh, and perfumed as the spring violets on Sentinel Gate.
A woman without a trace of conscience, who showed no signs of guilt for anything she had done? That was Sinara. The thought brought back memories of Glenna Omar. What was Glenna doing right this minute, back on the garden world of Sentinel Gate? Louis didn’t know, but he had his suspicions.
He gestured to the seat at the other side of his desk. “Sit down.”
“Over there? Not over here?” She was standing by him and breathing into his ear.
“Not now. We got work to do. We’re heading down to Marglot. Question is, who goes and who stays here?”
“Everyone should go. It maximizes our chances of survival.”
“What makes you think so?”
“In our survival training classes on Persephone, we were provided logical proofs, based on long-established game theory results, that the probability of survival in an unknown environment is proportional to the size of that party.”
“That’s fine, if you happen to regard survival as a game. In our case, I can see three or four things wrong with the idea that everybody should go. First, whoever we send may need backup. If the Have-It-All went down to the surface and somehow got smashed up, that would be it. There’s no sign of another ship anywhere in the Marglot system. That means we gotta send the pinnace down, and keep the Have-It-All up here and out of danger in case it’s needed for a rescue mission. It could make it down e
asy enough on autopilot, but I’d rather have somebody at the controls who can make the right decision if things get hairy.”
“So you have to leave Claudius here. He’s the best pilot. But I don’t think from the look of him this morning he’s in any condition to travel.”
“That’s his problem, not ours. Claudius is a navigator, an’ I don’t know how good he pilots when he’s not juiced up. Anyway, are you willin’ to put that much faith in a Chism Polypheme? I’m not. Give him half a chance and Claudius would be out of here an’ take the Have-It-All with him. He says this ship is no good, but you can see his eye roll when he looks at some of the fixtures. I don’t care how bad he’s feelin’, he has to go down ’cause I don’t trust him here.
“Which brings us to the second problem. You flew the pinnace down to Pompadour, so you know it don’t have that much space on it. In principle it has a three-person limit, though you can squeeze two in the back if you have to. Archimedes can’t go—he’d be bulging out of the hatch with no room for anyone else.”
“That gives you one definite stay-at-home on the Have-It-All.”
“Yeah. Trouble is, Archimedes is stronger than greed but he ain’t none too smart. If it came to a rescue mission, it’d be a toss-up whether you’d trust him or the autopilot to take the right action. You need a rescue crew that’s smart and a good enough pilot to land the ship on top of Julian Graves’s bald head and be out of there before he has time to feel the pain. And there’s one other thing. You need a rescue crew that won’t turn and run, no matter how dangerous it gets. You need a rescue crew that would die rather than leave you behind on the surface of Marglot.”
“Kallik and J’merlia?”
“You got it. Put all that together, and it’s easy. Atvar H’sial and I go down in the pinnace, and so does Claudius. Archimedes, Kallik and J’merlia stay behind. Kallik is really smart, and J’merlia flies this ship better than I ever could. Both of them are so devoted to At and me they’d come after us if we were marooned in hell. In fact, they’re too damned devoted—if we don’t stop ’em, they’ll be down there every ten minutes to check on us. I’ll tell ’em to come if they get my signal, or the pinnace beacon goes dead, an’ not before. That leaves only one person still to decide.”
“Me? You can’t possibly mean me.” Sinara stood in her most aggressive hands-on-hips stance. “Let me remind you of something, Louis. I am a survival team member. I am trained for trouble.”
“You certainly know how to start it. All right, you’re the fourth. It will be a squeeze in the pinnace, but we’ll manage.”
“We’ll do more than manage. We’ll have fun.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. Because I’ll be the pilot, and the way space inside the pinnace is arranged, either Atvar H’sial or Claudius will have to sit next to you. I’ll give you the choice.” Louis looked up at her scowling face. “If you want to hear the rest of it, you might as well sit down again.”
“The rest of it? You had this all worked out before I came in. You didn’t want me to help, you just wanted me to listen.”
“Not true. A second head can help. I think I know what I’m doin’, but suppose I’m wrong? Here’s the other part. We’re going down to Marglot, but where do we land?”
“Are you asking me, or are you just going to tell me?” But Sinara sat down again.
“I’m going to explain the situation as I see it. Then I’m goin’ to ask your opinion. What we know isn’t much and it isn’t complicated. We have six people in suits in one place on the surface, near the Hot Pole. Kallik has been monitoring suit signals, and one of the people is banged up pretty good.”
“Who?”
“Ben Blesh.”
“I bet he got hurt trying to be a hero. That was always his ambition.”
“No information on that, an’ you’re bein’ bitchy. The others are all right. But we got one, E.C. Tally, way off in the temperate zone between the hot and cold hemispheres. How he got there, what he’s doin’ there, your guess is as good as mine.
“Now we come to what we really don’t know. Who else, or what else, is down there? The Marglotta were advanced enough to commission a Polypheme ship an’ fly all the way to the Orion Arm to ask for help. They must have had some spaceflight of their own. You’d expect to see satellites buzzing all over the place around Marglot. We don’t. Maybe in the combined gravity field of the sun, M-2, and Marglot, orbital paths are so weird that orbital decay times stop you puttin’ up anything unmanned. But that’s pure guesswork.
“Then there’s the surface. Before you can have spaceflight, you need a pretty advanced civilization. It doesn’t have to be out on the surface—Lo’tfian females run everything from their burrows, and only the males wander around above ground. But normally you expect spaceports an’ stuff like that. Archimedes plotted out lots of structures that could be cities or industrial plants on the warm hemisphere, but he can’t see anythin’ moving near any of them. Also, we don’t pick up a peep of radio signals from them. The strangest thing is that on the cold side, where Archimedes finds no trace of industrial structures, we pick up scads of radio noise all over the place. An’ when I say noise, I mean it. The signals are junk, as though hundreds of people in suits were all jabbering at each other at once with nobody listening. One of those babble centers seems right about the place where we pick up the beacon of E.C. Tally’s suit.”
Louis leaned back in his chair. He would never admit it to anybody, but it was nice to have an audience—especially an audience as attentive, fair-skinned and bright-eyed as Sinara Bellstock. A man could get into lots of trouble with an attractive young woman like that hanging on his words—if he wasn’t in twenty-seven kinds of trouble already.
Sinara raised her eyebrows at him. “Do you really want my opinion?”
“I’m waitin’ for it.”
“Well, I would say the choices are rather clear-cut. There is exactly one place on Marglot where you have a member of our party, and also evidence of surface activity. We should take the pinnace down to E.C. Tally’s location and find out what’s going on there.”
“You got it in one. Can you be ready in two hours?”
“Louis, I’m ready now. For anything.”
She looked it. Her cheeks were glowing.
“One other thing, Sinara. We have no idea what we may find down on the surface. We all wear suits.”
“I know that. I’m not a raw trainee, I’m a survival specialist. Assume I’m good at something.”
Louis did, but he wouldn’t say what. He watched her bounce out, happy as if he’d announced they all had the day off and were going for a picnic down on Marglot. She had come to the same decision as him about a choice of destination, but there was one detail of Louis’s own thought processes that he had declined to mention: of all the creatures, human or non-human, that you might find down on the surface of the planet, E.C. Tally was the one entity whom Louis Nenda could persuade into believing almost anything.
Unfortunately, others already on Marglot might be able to persuade E.C. just as easily.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Fun and games on Marglot
One more decision had to be made. Louis had not mentioned it to Sinara, because he was still turning it over in his mind. They had not come here to see the sights, so the safest approach would be to fly to your landing point as directly as possible. On the other hand, if there were spoils to be gained on Marglot—something which Louis increasingly doubted—then a survey from a few thousand meters above the ground, and even a landing at multiple locations, would be needed.
He never made a final decision. He didn’t have to, because Atvar H’sial made it for him.
“Do you anticipate that we will be obliged to wear closed suits for most of the period while we are on the surface of Marglot?”
“Dunno. Seems like there’s a pretty good chance of it, ’specially when we meet Tally an’ whatever goes with him.”
“Then let me remind you that on simil
ar occasions in the past, you and I have suffered because of our inability to communicate. Sealed suits prevent any form of pheromonal communication, and you have difficulties when I seek to make statements employing human speech modes.”
“You’re gettin’ better, At.”
“Do not waste both our times. Your true opinion of my efforts shows clearly as a sub-text. No matter. What is important is that, since you and I will be unable to communicate efficiently once we are on the surface and our suits are closed, we must have an opportunity to decide upon a course of action before we arrive. We are able to fly in the pinnace with suits open. I therefore propose that we perform a preliminary reconnaissance of Marglot and formulate our plans, before we land and close our suits to meet with E.C. Tally and whatever surrounds him.”
“Got it. I’ll define a full low-altitude circuit of the planet before we touch down. Anything shoots at us, naturally we’ll be out of there.”
Louis thought about his partner again as he took the final steps to separate the pinnace from the Have-It-All and begin the swoop toward Marglot. You took one look at a Cecropian and you wished you could wake up; but you were already awake, and when it came to business the pheromonal conversations between Louis and Atvar H’sial agreed point by point. Those conversations were also—Louis was very aware of Sinara, sitting right behind him and breathing down the back of his neck—unclouded by those other pheromonal exchanges which prevented clear-headed discussion with members of the opposite sex.
He stared ahead at their nearing destination. From this distance one whole hemisphere of Marglot was visible. It was almost all the cold side. Making a landing down there among the ice ridges of the oceans or the vertical walls of land glaciers would not be easy. With any luck they would never have to try it.
He had his suit open, and he was offering a running commentary on what he saw to the Cecropian at his side. Atvar H’sial was in the observer’s seat—a wild misnomer in this case, since her echolocation permitted her to see only what was in the cabin of the pinnace. Louis wondered how she could stand it. She couldn’t “see” anything at all unless it gave off or reflected sound waves. For Atvar H’sial there were no stars, no moons, no galaxies—not even the planet below, until they were close to the ground. And, once her suit was sealed, there was also no speech. The urge to open up as soon as they landed would be enormous. But she never complained.
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