That Louis Nenda—for it was he who first emerged from the pinnace—heard E.C. at all was debatable. He half turned toward Atvar H’sial, who was still inside the vehicle but whose suit was open enough to show the flash of bright yellow trumpet horns.
Nenda said, “Are you sure?” And then, after another few seconds, “I don’t know what you think those things are that you’re talkin’ to, E.C., but Atvar H’sial assures me that they are not organic.”
“How does she know?”
“From what she can see inside of them—or sometimes, what she can’t see at all. Her ultrasonics are stopped by the carapace. Heavy-duty absorber. But she says the legs are sure as hell mechanical, with oil-driven hydraulic cylinders to move ’em along.”
“Aha!” As always, E.C. Tally received new information gladly. “That explains one small mystery. All communication seems to be at radio frequencies, which I had never before encountered in an organic being.”
“Never mind the small mystery. What about the big one. How the devil did you finish up here, on Marglot?”
“I am on Marglot? How fortuitous. I entered a transfer vortex, and at once found myself in orbit about this planet. My re-entry, of course, I directed to bring me as close as possible to the group of creatures that you now see around us.”
“How did you become separated from the rest of the group?”
“Others? There are others, here on this planet?” E.C. Tally regarded Nenda with the innocent eyes of one in whom duplicity had never been programmed.
Sinara Bellstock had emerged from the pinnace and was standing next to Nenda. “Lots of them,” she said. “Professor Lang and Captain Rebka and Councilor Graves, and all the other survival team members except Lara Quistner. Do you mean you didn’t come here with them?”
“I did not. In fact, I wonder how they could have found each other. In my final communication with them, the councilor and two survival team members were still on board the Pride of Orion. The others were exploring the large planet in the dead system where we first arrived at the Sag Arm.”
Nenda had been glaring at the beetlebacks, which had stopped retreating and were now approaching, little by little. “You say you’ve been talkin’ to them?”
“Not exactly. I have been engaged in data collection, building a base for communication. For the past three days my stock of information has grown to be most extensive. I am confident that, given time for analysis, I will be able to analyze fully and comprehend all that has been said.”
“That’s good, because I don’t like the look of your buggy friends at all. And we have to find out how Graves and the rest of ’em made it to Marglot. Come on, Tally. Into the pinnace, and we’re off.”
“Without conclusion of our interactions? Also, sufficient accommodation in the pinnace is lacking.” Tally had seen the sprawled corkscrew body in the back seat. “It was designed for only two in the rear, and Claudius is already within.”
“Sit on top of him.” The buzz of radio sound from the beetlebacks was increasing. “Inside now, or I’ll grab you and wipe your data banks.”
“You would not!” But for E.C. Tally it was the ultimate threat. He scrambled inside as fast as any of the others. As the pinnace lifted he was sitting on Claudius’s non-existent knee. The data stream emanating from the Chism Polypheme required no effort at all to analyze and comprehend.
* * *
On descent, or even in level flight, the pinnace could manage a four-passenger load with fair ease. Taking off with five on board was another matter. The engines throbbed and labored until they reached a cruising altitude that satisfied Nenda.
Tally visualized their path. If, as Louis Nenda had said, they were flying to a point near what Graves had termed the “Hot Pole,” then their course must take them “westward” with respect to Marglot’s axis of rotation. This was a direction away from the dawn, so when they arrived at the Hot Pole it would be the middle of the night there.
Another factor, however, might prove to be much more important. Tally listened to the engines. He knew the specifications of the pinnace, and also Marglot’s gravity field. The calculation and conclusion were simple. The pinnace could fly with its present load, but it could not return to space any more than he could do so with the aid of his suit alone. Either a larger ship must descend to the surface and provide transportation, or the pinnace would be obliged to make multiple trips to orbit.
As to the question posed by Louis Nenda concerning the means by which other parties from the Pride of Orion had reached Marglot and the Hot Pole, Tally gave it not a microsecond’s thought—for the simple reason that they would soon enough be in a position to ask the question directly of the people concerned.
To address all these minor issues he deployed only a tiny fraction of his computational resources. The cabin was quiet as it flew through the night sky, and Tally was free to work without distraction on the main problem: understanding what the silvery beetle creatures had said. He was undeterred by Atvar H’sial’s revelation that they were inorganic forms. Was he not himself an inorganic form? The chances were excellent that their utterances when finally interpreted would prove to be logical, lucid, and rational, unencumbered by the glandular effusions that so often contaminated the speech of humans and other organic beings.
Although detailed understanding was far away, one point was already clear to E.C. Individual beetlebacks did not possess separate intelligence. They were more like social insects or Decantil Myrmecons, in which each unit was capable of movement and action, but only if those actions supported a decision somehow made by the whole group. More than that, in the case of the beetlebacks even the group that had met with Tally was not a complete mind. It formed one node of a distributed intelligence, whose parts included every cluster of beetlebacks on Marglot. There were many thousands of those; and, just as each individual beetleback was an expendable unit, the whole complex was itself expendable. It was on Marglot for a reason—the sense of purpose was overwhelming; but once that purpose was fulfilled, the future was undefined.
There was also an impression, and Tally could put it no more strongly than that, that the beetleback activity level was increasing rapidly. It seemed to lead to something with no physical meaning: a singularity. Although a singularity could not exist in the real universe, one might exist in the universe as perceived by the beetlebacks. Suppose, for example, that at some point they themselves ceased to function?
Tally looked around the cabin. He felt that he had achieved an important if imperfect breakthrough. But to whom could he express it? Sinara and Claudius were sound asleep. However, the pinnace was not flying on autopilot. Louis Nenda was—let us hope!—still conscious.
“May I speak?”
Nenda turned a fraction in his seat. “You know, normally when I hear you say that, I grit my teeth. But there’s so much nothin’ goin’ on around here, I can use a change. What you got?”
“A partial understanding, perhaps, of beetleback nature and purpose.”
Tally summarized his findings, collapsing the results of quadrillions of data sorts, merges, and compressions into a five-minute description. He expected skepticism. His conclusion was admittedly radical. But Nenda merely said, “Give me a second. I want to make sure this gets through loud and clear to Atvar H’sial.”
The silence that followed was far more than a second. Tally assumed that some considerable pheromonal discussion was going on between human and Cecropian.
Finally, Nenda said, “At thinks you’ve nailed it on the button. Your buddies are one small piece of a much bigger operation, and when that’s done they’ll be history. At believes the Big Chill is on the way. The sun will go out and Marglot will become the ultimate icebox. Does that make sense in terms of what the bugs have been sayin’ to each other?”
“I do not know.” For the first time since his original embodiment, E.C. felt that the speed of his mental processes was inadequate. First he needed to frame Atvar H’sial’s hypothesis in strictly log
ical terms, then he must evaluate its consistency in terms of the entire mass of beetleback recorded data. “The question is difficult. The necessary analysis may take hours.”
“Well, hours is what we’ve got. About three more of ’em, is my guess, before we touch down near the suit beacons. Go to it, E.C. Oh, an’ Atvar H’sial says there’s one thing we need to know in particular.”
“Ask, and I will seek to determine it.”
“It’s a simple question: If there’s goin’ to be a big freeze, how long until the action starts? When is Showtime?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Help needed from the Have-It-All.
Hans Rebka had trained himself to sleep at almost any place and any time. That talent, however, was not an asset in times of danger. Then you normally slept little, if at all.
But when were you in danger? Sometimes common sense said one thing, while a part of your suspicious hindbrain declined to agree. Inside the cone-house everything was quiet. Outside, the rain had ended and the wind died away. With no animal life, large or small, night on Marglot should be both silent and safe.
That certainly seemed to be the opinion of the rest of the party. Hans, with the headlight of his suit reduced to the faintest glimmer, moved quietly from figure to still figure. Torran Veck—Julian Graves—Darya Lang—Teri Dahl—Ben Blesh—all were asleep, though now and again Ben would murmur something unintelligible.
So why was Hans awake? The sound when it came was at first no louder than the rustle of wind across tall grass. It seemed like imagination, until as it strengthened Hans heard a rhythmic undertone. That was the noise of the engine of a ground or air vehicle—and it was approaching.
Hans went to Darya and shook her.
“Best if we’re awake, I think.” And then, when she stared at him as though she had never seen him before, “Help me rouse the others. Visitors are on the way.”
She blinked up at him. “Can’t be. We’re the only ones on the planet.”
“Not anymore. Trust me.” Hans moved on, to shake Julian Graves awake. By the time everyone was sitting up there could no longer be any doubt about the sound outside.
“Best if most of you stay where we are. I’ll take a look.” Hans expected opposition, but the others were still hardly more than half awake. He slipped out, pushing aside the thick leaf layers.
The night was unexpectedly cold. It was also cloudy. Was the area around the Hot Pole ever anything but cloudy?
He walked around the cone-house in time to see a pinnace making a soft landing about fifty meters away.
Smart thinking. Whoever was flying it had homed in on the suit beacons and knew that they were in the cone-house. But the pilot wouldn’t know who else or what else might be inside with them. Rebka walked toward the ship. When the hatch opened and the figure who emerged was Louis Nenda, somehow that was no surprise at all.
* * *
The cone-house was big enough, even for eleven. After the excited—and bewildered—greetings, comparisons began.
Comparisons, because you could hardly call them explanations. Each group in turn told what had happened after leaving the Pride of Orion and described how they came to be on Marglot. Julian Graves was the last to speak. Long before he was done, Louis Nenda was wriggling and fidgeting where he sat. He raised his eyebrows at Hans Rebka.
Hans waited for Graves’s final words, then said to Nenda, “I agree. You’re right.”
“Right? I’m more than right. I’m damned right, and this is all wrong.” And, when the others stared at Nenda, “Don’t you see it, any of you except Rebka?”
Hans said, “They don’t. We have to explain.” He turned to the rest. “There’s such a thing as coincidence, but this goes beyond it. Look at the facts. Every group went in different directions and did totally different things. But here we are on Marglot, all of us.”
“Not all of us.” Ben spoke softly. “Lara isn’t here. That was my fault.”
“No.” Darya turned to him. “It was my fault. I was the one who insisted on going to Iceworld.”
Rebka said, “It was Lara’s own fault—she deliberately disobeyed Ben’s order. Anyway, we’ve already been over that ten times. We have to focus on today. How did it happen that we all arrived here, like magic?”
“Just like magic.” Nenda snorted. “Let me tell you somethin’. When I was younger and even dumber than I am now, I wasted lots of time in the Eyecatch Gallery on Scordato. I studied the gamblin’ games, an’ finally I found one I liked. I watched it played, figured I couldn’t lose. Twenty buttons, and twenty different colors that could come up on a screen. The color for any button changed randomly with each play. You paid for ten tries. If on any try you pressed your button and the screen came up yellow, you were sunk—out of the game. Otherwise you kept goin’. Make it all the way, an’ you won double your original stake. I worked out the odds. You had nineteen chances out of twenty that you’d make it through any one try, so you had nearly a six out of ten chance—Tally will confirm this—of makin’ it through all ten. That was better than evens of winnin’. So I paid my stake, an’ I played. I hit green and purple and orange and black, all the way through to my tenth play. Then I pushed a button one last time, an’ the screen came up yellow. What I hadn’t known was that the game was rigged. If you made it as far as the tenth play, you got yellow no matter what button you pushed.”
The others stared at Nenda as though he had switched to some alien language, until Hans Rebka said, “Like the system we found ourselves in when we reached the Sag Arm. It was rigged. No matter what route you took from the Pride of Orion, or what method you tried, the screen finally came up yellow—you were shipped here.”
Nenda added, “All roads lead to Marglot. I bet there’s a thousand more buttons in that system that nobody tried. Me an’ At, we did it the hard way. Off through the Bose Network to Pleasureworld, then all the way to Pompadour. But we didn’t need to. We could have closed our eyes, pushed any button, and finished up in a transport vortex that would bring us here.”
“Here,” Darya Lang said, “where the animals are already dead. Here, where all other life on the planet is going to die. If Tally and Atvar H’sial are correct, here is a place where everything is doomed, even the sun itself. Why bring us here, just so we can die?” She turned to Nenda. “You say you and Atvar H’sial are the stupid ones, but you came here in a ship. And the reason you have that ship is because you didn’t arrive using a transport vortex. If it weren’t for you, we would have no way to escape.”
“Minor correction. It’s a pinnace, not a ship. An’ with all you lot"—Nenda counted—"we’d never cram you in. Even if we piled you three deep, we wouldn’t get off the ground. Either it’s half a dozen trips to orbit, which would really be pushing the pinnace, or else the Have-It-All has to come down. Which I hate like hell to do, because that’s my last card.”
“But if E.C. Tally is right, we will be forced to seek such an escape. And yet—and yet—” Julian Graves sat with his hand hooding his eyes. “Logic is not my strong point, but I am confused. The Builders brought us here. I accept that. I can even accept that they were not aware of our mortal weakness, and expected that we would find a way to survive. But why not bring us here directly? Why have us travel first to a dead system?”
Darya said, “So we could see it. Would you ever have believed that a stellar system could die like that, if you hadn’t been there and seen it for yourself? I wouldn’t. The Builders wanted us to know that a whole system could die, before we were brought to one that is dying.”
“But if the Builders destroyed the other system—” Teri Dahl began.
“They didn’t. It was the others—the Destroyers—who did it.”
“The Destroyers, the Voiders,” Torran Veck said. “Sure. If everything doesn’t work out with one race of super-beings, invent another. Professor Lang, if you can’t make sense—”
“Save the bickering for later.” Julian Graves cut him off. “I make no claims as
to my performance, which has so far been pathetic; but I am still the leader of this expedition. It is my conclusion that Professor Lang is right. We were brought to the Sag Arm for a purpose. That purpose is to see what has happened, to understand what can happen, and to take that knowledge back with us to the Orion Arm. Whatever causes this, we must find a way to stop it—not only for the sake of beings in this arm, for our own home clades.” He turned to Nenda. “I am assuming that the Have-It-All is still somewhere in orbit?”
“Sure it is. One yell from me and J’merlia can bring it here. But I won’t do that ’til we have to, because the Have-It-All is my only ticket home.”
“That is a policy both wise and practical. Also, we should learn as much as possible before we leave Marglot. However, for my own peace of mind I would like you to do one thing. Please contact your crew on the Have-It-All and confirm that they are in a position to land here on Marglot, if necessary at short notice.”
“I’ll do it—though I’ll tell you right now, the idea of this lot clutterin’ up the inside of my ship don’t exactly thrill me. I’ll call from the pinnace. It has better transmission equipment than the suits, an’ there are channels that Kallik will be sure to have open. Take me a few minutes.”
He moved to the multiple overlapping leaf layers that formed the wall of the cone-house. As he pulled the inner layer aside, Hans Rebka was somehow standing next to him.
Nenda paused with his hand on the side of the leaf. He said, softly enough so that Rebka alone could hear, “I don’t remember anybody invitin’ you.”
“I invited myself.” Rebka motioned Nenda to continue beyond the inner layer. When they were standing in the narrow space between the leaves, he went on, “Look, I know what I think of you, and I can guess that you don’t think any better of me. But we are both realists. Like it or not, Julian Graves is in charge of this expedition and the others will do what he says.”
Resurgence hu-5 Page 28