“Something sure as hell did. What’s the second phase?”
“I offer no conjecture as to when it may happen; but the second phase will extinguish the central star, and turn this whole system into one as dead as that which greeted our arrival in the Sagittarius Arm.”
Louis glanced up at M-2, as though to confirm that it still stood close to full-moon phase reflecting the light of the sun. “At, you’re a real bundle of joy. Next time I ask you what you’ve been thinkin’, remind me that I’d probably rather not know.”
He said nothing more, but under his control the engines changed their tone. The pinnace flew faster and faster over the dim-lit terrain beneath.
The darkness deepened. They were still on the night side, away from the sun. As they circled the planet, M-2 hung lower in the sky, providing weaker reflected sunlight to the pinnace.
Louis stared back at the gas-giant planet. “It’s gonna be awful dark when we get to the place where Tally is sittin’, and daylight will still be hours and hours away.”
“Are you suggesting that we should delay our landing, and hover until dawn?”
“No way!”
“I thought not. Since the pinnace can land as well in light or dark, delay offers neither theoretical nor practical advantage.”
“Remind me not to tell you what I’m thinkin’, either. You’ll have me as miserable as Claudius if we keep this up.”
But in fact, Louis was already feeling his spirits rise. Soon they would be on the ground again, with a chance for action and maybe violence. People like Darya Lang could sit around for years and just think, but there had never been time in Louis’s life to get used to that sort of thing. Get in trouble, whack a few heads, get out of trouble—that he could understand.
He turned around and winked at Sinara. “Time to close suits, sweetie. We’ll be on the ground in a few minutes.” To Claudius he added, “You can keep yours open if you like. You’d be a lot more entertaining rollin’ around and screamin’ in agony.”
The low-altitude radar had picked out a place for a landing: a flat hilltop, part of it clear of everything but random patches of old ice. Louis examined the radar image of the ground ahead as the pinnace drifted in. He changed the glide angle a fraction of a degree.
After that he didn’t need to work the controls at all. Louis folded his arms and leaned back. The ship touched down gently, and slid to a halt as smoothly and unobtrusively as a Karelian hostess picking your pocket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ben’s dream
Ben Blesh burned.
At the Hot Pole, bathed in the warm outflow from the gas-giant world to which Marglot was tethered by an invisible gravitational string, summer reigned perpetual. With the sun hidden by clouds, day and night temperatures differed by only a few degrees. A human could not ask for a more placid and comfortable setting.
But Ben was burning up. He was not feverish. His suit would not permit such a thing. With its controlled flow of drugs into his body, it could stabilize elements of his physical condition. But it could not determine his state of mind. The source of heat that he felt was a fiery self-hatred and disgust coming from within. He had become a burden to the expedition, rather than a cherished asset. Others might excuse his behavior on the surface of Iceworld; he never could.
They had treated him kindly and gently. Hans Rebka and Torran Veck had cleaned the mummified fragments from the inside of the legged vehicle, then rearranged the interior better to serve human needs. They had carried him to a makeshift bed there, despite his assertion that he was perfectly able to walk and manage the couple of steps up. They had told him to rest and conserve his strength, and to tell them if he needed anything. They had asked him how he was feeling.
He had lied to them.
And then they had left, and forgotten his existence. Except for occasional brief appearances to check on his condition, everyone ignored him. He had his suit open as far as he could without interfering with its medical functions, and he watched the other five through the transparent windows of the vehicle. They gathered in a ring, talking intensely to each other and gesturing in various directions. Clearly, they were making definite plans, and he was no part of them.
He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, two of the party had vanished.
It was the suit, deciding that he would benefit from a nap. It knew what it was doing from a medical point of view, because unless he moved he felt no trace of pain from his arm or his ribs. Even so, it was infuriating to have so little control over his own body.
He closed his eyes again, and this time when he awoke the whole group had disappeared. Where were they? Exploring—without him? As he watched, the ground twenty meters ahead began to tremble. The air above it seemed to thicken and shiver. A ghostly outline of a sphere formed. It hovered for a few minutes, then gradually faded. The earth once again became silent. Nothing moved, anywhere in the landscape.
Hallucination? That was not recorded as a side effect of any of the suit’s medications. What he had just seen had to be real. Guardian of Travel, true to its word, had opened a transfer field leading back to the middle of Iceworld. It would open “at regular intervals.” What did that mean to something like Guardian of Travel? Once a day, once a year, once a millennium? Maybe he had seen its only appearance in a million years.
Ben stared and stared, but the shimmering sphere did not return. He closed his eyes again, and when he opened them the brighter glow in the clouds that marked the sun’s position had changed. It stood lower in the sky.
Soon afterwards, Darya Lang climbed into the car.
“How are you?” she said. It was what they all said when they came in to check his condition—that, and little more. But this time Darya went on, “We’ve been clocking the rate of movement of the sun, and in another two hours it will be dark. We can’t possibly all fit into this car, and Teri Dahl has found a much better place for us to spend the night.”
“I saw the transfer field again, the one that links this world with the interior of Iceworld.”
“Did you? That’s interesting.” But Darya was not listening, because she at once went on, “Ben, what I’m going to do may hurt you. I have to walk us to the place that Teri Dahl found. I’ll keep the car’s movements as smooth as possible, but let me know if you feel any discomfort.”
Discomfort? Ben felt rage. He wished that he could be anywhere but here. To everyone else in the party he was a useless dead weight. He had missed his chance. He could have walked thirty meters to the transfer field. Given the choice he would rather be back in the middle of Iceworld, talking to Guardian of Travel. They had left before learning everything that the ancient Builder construct might be able to tell them. There was some sort of super-vortex at the heart of this very planet. Suppose that Ben had asked to be sent there, rather than to the surface? That might have thrown him a million or a billion lightyears. It might have killed him—Guardian of Travel had not described it as a transport vortex. So it killed him. In his present mood he didn’t care.
“Are you feeling all right?” Darya’s voice itself seemed to come from a distance of a million lightyears. The walking car had reached the top of the hill and was making its slow way down the other side.
“If you mean, do I hurt, I don’t.” Ben saw towering objects ahead, shaped like the truncated cones that dotted the area where they had arrived. But these were ten times the size. “If you mean, do I feel pleased at the idea I’m going to be spending the night inside this crapheap, I still don’t.”
“You won’t be. None of us will.”
The car was lumbering toward one of the squat towers. Darya halted it ten meters away.
“Can you walk? If not I’ll get some help.”
“I can walk.” Or die trying. Ben eased himself to an upright position and carefully climbed out of the car. Now his right side did hurt, no doubt about it. Maybe that was a good thing. He had heard that when broken bones were knitting together it was the most
painful time. True or not, he moved like an old man.
“A few more steps.” Darya was on one side of him, and now Hans Rebka walked on the other. He brushed away their offers of help.
The outside of the cone structure was an overlapping layer of giant leaves, each one as tall as a human and much wider. As Ben shambled forward, Teri Dahl pulled one leaf aside and gestured him through.
“Home, sweet home, Ben. At least for the time being. In you go. It’s safe and dry.”
He saw that she and the others were not wearing suits, and he envied them. He would love to get out of his own, even though he knew that would be a disaster. It was working hard on his behalf.
The layers of great leaves ran four deep. Once past them Ben stood in a wide space, dimly lit by light diffusing in from high above. The structure was supported by a thick central trunk at least a meter wide. The floor was dry, proof that the outer leaf layers were dense enough to keep out the rain that seemed to fall every few hours. The floor was bare, but not naturally so. Someone had been busy with housekeeping of an unusually gruesome kind. A stack of small mummified bodies stood at the far side of the clearing.
“Don’t worry. We’ll get them out of here in the morning.” Teri Dahl had followed Ben in and seen what he was looking at. “They’re not Marglotta, they’re some form of wild animal. We think they made those, and they probably lived up there.”
Ben turned his head back, feeling the pull on his ribs as he did so. Ten meters above him, the inside of the hollow cone bore drooping interlaced layers of thick white fibers, spreading out from the central trunk and connecting to the outer leaves. Above them, Ben could see bunches of rounded globes, glowing golden-orange even in the faded light, each one as big as his fist.
“They’re edible,” Teri said, “but climbing up to get them is a pain. We could do it if we had to, but Hans Rebka says there are better things to eat within easy walking distance. Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”
Ben didn’t have an easy walking distance, and he was not sure he could ever be comfortable again. He moved to the place Teri had indicated and sat down on a pile of springy undergrowth that someone had cut and dragged in from outside.
“Not luxury, but a lot better than getting drenched,” Teri said. “Hans Rebka claims that the really heavy rain will come at night, when the temperature drops a few degrees.” She came to sit beside him. “We have food, we have shelter, and we certainly have water.”
The others of the group had one by one entered, until now all stood or sat inside the cone-house. Julian Graves, coming in just in time to hear Teri’s final words, added, “Probably more water than we’d like. We are safe enough here, but we have no idea how we might leave the planet unless some others of the expedition show up. I wish I understood how our two groups came to arrive in the same place, when we took such different paths. Fortunately we need be in no hurry to learn that, or to leave. We can take our time.”
Ben saw the others nodding, until Darya Lang said abruptly, “Sorry to be the company killjoy, but that’s just not true. Marglot might seem safe enough, and in one sense it is. But we can’t stay here very long. If we do we’ll be in deep trouble.”
“From what?” Hans Rebka was staring all around him. “I’m usually the pessimist of the group, but I don’t see anything to frighten us. No floods, no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no ravenous beasts looking to chomp on our rear ends.”
“That’s the whole point, Hans. No ravenous beasts—no beasts of any kind. While you were exploring, I dug in the wet soil and looked on and in the plants. I found plenty of animal life. It’s everywhere. Small and big, everything from half-meter crawlers down to sizes I can only pick up using my suit magnifiers. But it’s all like those.” She pointed to the heap of shrunken corpses at the other side of the cone-house clearing. “Dead. I don’t think there is a living animal anywhere on the surface of Marglot.”
Torran Veck shrugged. “So what? I’ve never been to Fredholm, but I understand that it’s the same way. It’s a world with vegetable life and fungi, and a bunch of microorganisms that break down dead materials. But it supports a stable biosphere.”
“It does. Everything is in balance on Fredholm because it evolved that way, over billions of years. The situation here is totally different. This planet had a balanced ecosphere—plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms all doing their bit. Then every animal suddenly died. Marglot is unstable from an ecological point of view. I don’t know how long it will take, but the vegetation will start to die, too—plants all rely on some animal forms. Oxygen content will start to go down as photosynthesis stops. I don’t know what the end point of the change will be, but long before the planet gets to that stage we’d better be gone. Nothing like humans will be able to live here. Think of it this way, Hans. We seem to be the only living animals on Marglot. It’s rarely good to be an anomaly. We need to find a way to escape, and we need to do it fast.”
“I don’t think you should be so worried, Darya.” But Hans Rebka went off to sit by himself with his back against the central trunk.
No one else was eager to continue the discussion. After a few minutes, Ben moved from a sitting position to lie flat on his back. He was actually less comfortable than in the walking car, but he had no desire to go back there. No matter how gloomy the conversation, here he at least was part of it. He was free to offer his opinions.
High up near the top of the tree-cone, the daylight slowly faded. A new sound began, of a gusting wind. The atmospheric circulation patterns on Marglot must follow the moving day-night boundary, even at the Hot Pole. Soon the pummeling of torrential rain began on the sturdy outside leaves.
Night on Marglot. A planet which, according to Darya Lang, was steadily but surely dying. Ben closed his eyes.
In your dreams you encountered situations like this, hopeless corners with no way out. Except that in your dreams, there always was an answer; and you were always the one who found it.
In your dreams. Ben opened his eyes. The interior of the cone-house was dark. He could not hear the others breathing above the sound of the rain.
This was not a dream. This was reality.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Together again
If there was a heaven for embodied computers, which E.C. Tally most seriously doubted, then he was in it.
He sat at the center of a circle of a hundred and more beetlebacks, just as he had sat for the past three days. The silver beetlebacks neither moved nor slept; instead, they talked continuously. A complex syncopation of chatter of radio signals surrounded E.C.
So much for the Orion Arm theory of organic beings, that some sleep was essential for all forms of animal life! E.C. had delegated the rest functions of his own body to a tiny part of his brain. With all the rest of his intelligence, he listened, analyzed, and spoke.
This was going to be no easy task, as was the case with Builder constructs. All you needed with them was to keep talking for a while, and they would recall or invent the appropriate human speech patterns. The beetlebacks presented a very different problem. Tally was storing away every syllable of radio utterance within his capacious memory, and it was clear that this was not a monologue or dialogue. The beetleback data streams, all one hundred and thirty-seven of them, had to be considered simultaneously. They were aware of his presence, and of what he said. He knew this, because after every one of his own speeches or questions, the beetleback radio talk clamored more furiously than ever before returning to a calmer level. They were working as hard as he was, seeking some common ground of communication. He could not vouch for their analytic powers, separately or in combination, but his own search for patterns and correlations in the hundred-plus parallel data streams suggested an effort that might take days or weeks to complete, even with his prodigious computational powers.
This was the kind of task for which he had been designed. This was no trifling exercise, no piffling conversation with a slow-minded human, Cecropian, or Hymenopt.
He could not place them—of course not!—within the Orion Arm ensemble of life forms, but their appearance was generally insectoid. Their backs were shiny silver, their undersides jet black. Multi-legged, eyeless, and wingless, they appeared totally insensitive to cold. He could see no sign of suits, and the source of the radio signals was a mystery until it occurred to him that they must have evolved this way naturally. They spoke and heard at radio frequencies! The fuzzy antennas sprouting from their wedge-shaped scarlet heads supported that hypothesis. Perhaps they also saw using the same frequencies, although the long wavelengths of radio compared with optical signals would surely provide an image of inferior spatial detail. Maybe Tally himself was to them no more than a fuzzy and indistinct blob.
No matter. Communication could proceed through avenues other than the visual.
Tally talked and listened, and listened and talked, convinced that the growing data set of beetleback signals would eventually lead to a basis for understanding.
It was with a sense of irritation rather than anticipation that he finally received a strictly sonic signal beyond the sighing of the wind. He looked up. A pinnace, its lights bright against the night sky, was drifting in to make a landing on his ice-clad plateau.
Tally moved across to the craft as its hatch opened. It would probably do little good, but the point had to be made.
“May I speak? Just look at them!” He gestured toward the beetlebacks. “They are disconcerted and they are scattering. Your arrival has unfortunately much disturbed our work.”
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