Summertide hu-1

by Charles Sheffield

  CHAPTER 11

  Summertide minus thirteen

  Violent resistance is a problem, but nonresistance can be harder to handle.

  Hans Rebka felt like a boxer, braced for a blow that never came. At some level he was still waiting.

  “Didn’t they fight it?” he asked.

  Max Perry nodded. “Sure. At least, Louis Nenda did. But then he said he’d had it with the Dobelle system, and we could take his access request and stuff it, he was getting the hell out of here as soon as he could. And he already left.”

  “What about Darya Lang and Atvar H’sial?”

  “Lang didn’t say a word. There’s no way of knowing what Atvar H’sial thinks, but what came out of J’merlia didn’t have much steam in it. They went off to sulk on another Sling. I haven’t seen them for two days — haven’t had time to bother with them, to be honest. Think we ought to be worried?”

  The two men were in the final moments of waiting as the capsule taking them to Quake was coupled to the Umbilical. They were carrying their luggage, one small bag for each man. Julius Graves was over by the aircar that had brought them from Starside, fussing with his two heavy cases.

  Rebka considered Perry’s question carefully. His own assignment to Dobelle involved only the rehabilitation of Max Perry. In principle it had nothing to do with members of other clades, or how they were treated. But as far everyone on Opal was concerned, he was a senior official, and he had the duties that went with the position. He had received a new coded message from Circle headquarters just before they left Starside, but he had no great hopes that it would help him much, whatever it said. Advice and direction from far away were more likely to add to problems than to solve them.

  “People ought to be protesting a lot more,” he said at last. “Especially Louis Nenda. What’s the chances that he might leave Opal and try for a direct landing on Quake from space? He came in his own ship.”

  “There’s no way we could stop him trying. But unless his ship is designed for takeoff without spaceport facilities, he’ll be in trouble. He might get down on Quake, but maybe he’d never get off it.”

  “How about Darya Lang and Atvar H’sial?”

  “Impossible. They don’t have a ship available, and they won’t be able to rent one that will fly interplanetary. We can forget about them.”

  And then Perry hesitated. He was not sure of his own statement. There was that feeling in the air, a sense of final calm before a great storm. And it was not just the cloudbursts that threatened Opal within twenty-four hours.

  It was Summertide, hanging over everything. With thirteen Dobelle days to go, Mandel and Amaranth loomed larger and brighter. Average temperatures were already up five degrees, under angry clouds like molten copper. Opal’s air had changed in the last twelve hours. It was charged with a metallic taste that matched the lowering sky. Airborne dust left lips dry, eyes sore and weeping, noses itching and ready to sneeze. As the massive tides brought the seabed close to the surface, undersea earthquakes and eruptions were blowing their irritant fumes and dust high into the atmosphere.

  Julius Graves had finally stowed the cases to his satisfaction in the bottom level of the Umbilical’s car. He walked over to the other two men and stared up at the lambent sky.

  “Another storm coming. A good time to be leaving Opal.”

  “But a worse time to be going to Quake,” Perry said.

  They climbed into the car. Perry provided his personal ID and keyed in a complex command sequence.

  The three men maintained an uneasy formality as the ascent began. When Perry had quietly informed Graves that access to Quake was denied until after Summertide, Graves had just as coolly asserted the authority of the Council. He would be going to Quake anyway.

  Perry pointed out that Graves could not prevent planetary officials from accompanying him. They had a responsibility to stop him from killing himself.

  Graves nodded. Everyone was polite; no one was happy.

  The tension eased when the capsule emerged from Opal’s clouds. The three men had something else to occupy their minds. The car had been provided with sliding viewing ports in its upper level, as well as a large window directly overhead. The passengers had an excellent view of everything above and about them. As Quake appeared through the thinning clouds, any attempt at small talk faded.

  Julius Graves stared around, gasped, and gaped, while Max Perry took one look up and retreated into himself. Hans Rebka tried to ignore their surroundings and focus his mind on the task ahead. Perry might know all about Quake, and Graves might be a fount of information about every subject under a thousand suns; yet Rebka had the feeling that he would have to carry both of them.

  But carry them through what? He looked around, to find a panorama that swept away all rational thoughts. He had traveled the road to Quake just a few days before, but nothing was the same. Mandel, grossly swollen, loomed on the left. The Builder-designed shell of the car detected and filtered out dangerous hard radiation, turning the star’s glowing face into a dark image seamed and pocked with faculae, sunspots, and lurid flares. The disk was so large that Rebka felt he could reach out and touch its raddled surface.

  Amaranth — a dwarf no longer — stood beyond Quake. The companion was transformed. Even the color was changed. Rebka recognized that as an artificial effect. When the car windows altered their transmission properties to screen radiation from Mandel, they also modified the transmitted spectrum of Amaranth. Orange-red was transformed to glowering purple.

  Even Gargantua was well on the way to its final rendezvous. Reflecting the light of both Mandel and Amaranth, the gas-giant had swelled from a distant spark to a thumbnail-sized glow of bright orange.

  The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin. In the final hours of Summertide, Mandel and Amaranth would pass within five million kilometers of each other — the thickness of a fingernail, in stellar terms. Gargantua would hurtle close by Mandel on the side opposite to Amaranth, propelled in its orbit by the combined field of both stellar companions. And little Dobelle, caught in that syzygy of giants, would gyrate helplessly through the warp and woof of a dynamic gravitational tapestry.

  The Dobelle orbit was stable; there was no danger that Opal and Quake would separate, or that the doublet might be flung off to infinity. But that was the only assurance the astronomers would provide. Summertide surface conditions on Opal and Quake could not be calculated.

  Rebka stared up at Quake. That ball of dusky blue-gray had become the most familiar feature in the sky. It had not changed perceptibly since the last ride up the Umbilical.

  Or had it? He stared harder. Was the planet’s limb a little fuzzier, where dust in the peel-thin layer of air surrounding Quake had become thicker?

  There were few distractions to draw a traveler’s mind away from the outside view. Their ascent was at a constant rate, with no sense of motion inside the car. Only a very careful observer would notice the golden knot of Midway Station slowly increasing in size, while the apparent gravity within the capsule was just as gradually diminishing. The journey did not take place in free-fall. The body forces were decreasing steadily, but the only weightless part of the journey would be two thousand kilometers beyond Midway Station, where all centrifugal and gravitational forces were in balance. After that came the real descent to Quake, when the capsule would truly be falling toward that planet.

  Rebka sighed and stood up. It would be easy to allow the skyscape to hypnotize him, as Quake hypnotized Max Perry. And not just Perry. He glanced across at Graves. The councilor was totally absorbed in a reverie of his own.

  Rebka walked over to the ramp and went down its turning path to the lower level of the capsule. The galley was a primitive one, but there had been no chance of a meal since they left Starside. He was hungry and not choosy, and he dialed without looking. The flavor and contents of the container of soup that he ordered did not matter.

  With its opaque walls, the
lower level of the capsule was depressingly bland. Rebka went to the table and selected a private music segment. Pre-Expansion music, complex and polyphonic, sounded within his head. The intertwining fugal voices suggested the coming interplay of Mandel and its retinue. For ten minutes Rebka ate and listened, enjoying two of the most basic and oldest pleasures of humanity. He wondered. Did the Cecropians, lacking music, have some compensating art form of their own?

  When the piece ended he was surprised to find Julius Graves standing there watching him.

  “May I?” The councilor sat down at the table and gestured at the empty bowl. “Can you recommend it?”

  Rebka shrugged. Whatever Julius Graves wanted from him, opinions on soup were low on the list.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” Graves said, “how improbable it is that we are able, with very little assistance, to eat and digest the foods of a thousand different worlds? The ingredients of that soup were produced on Opal, but your stomach will have no trouble handling it. We and the Hymenopts and the beings of the Cecropian clade are totally different biologically. Not one of them is DNA-based. And yet, with the help of a few strains of single-celled bacteria in our gut, we can eat the same food as each other. Surprising, is it not?”

  “I guess so.”

  Rebka hated one-on-one conversations with Graves. Those mad blue eyes scared him. Even when the conversation seemed general he suspected an undercurrent, and to add to the confusion he was never sure how much input was coming from the mnemonic twin. Steven had a fondness for endless facts and stupid jokes, Julius for subtlety and indirection. The present conversation could be simple speculation from the one, or a devious probing from the other.

  Graves was grinning to himself. “I know, you don’t think it’s significant that we can eat Opal’s food, or Quake’s. But it is. For one thing, it disposes of a popular theory as to why Cecropians and humans did not fight when first they met. People say they avoided combat because they were not competing for the same resources. But that is nonsense. They not only compete for the same inorganic resources of metals and raw materials; they are also — with a little assistance at the bacterial level — able to eat the same food. A human could eat a Cecropian, if the need arose. Or vice versa. And that introduces a new mystery.”

  Rebka nodded to show that he was listening. It was better to play the straight man than say too much.

  “We look at a Cecropian,” Graves continued, “or a Lo’tfian, or a Hymenopt, and we say, how alien they are! How different from us! But the mystery is surely the other way round. We should say, why are we all so similar? How is it possible that beings derived from different clades, seeded on different worlds, warmed by suns of other stellar types, of totally disjoint biology, without one item of common history — how can it be that they are so alike that they can eat the same foods? That they are so close in body shape that we can use Earth-analogs — Cecropians, Hymenopts, Chrysemides — in beings from the most distant stars. That we can all talk to each other, one way or another, and understand each other amazingly well. That we share the same standards of behavior. So much so, that a single ethical council can agree on rules to apply through the whole of the spiral arm. How can these things be?

  “But then, the spiral arm is filled with mysteries.”

  Graves was heading somewhere, Rebka was sure. But the other had a long way to go before he made any kind of sense. For the moment, all he seemed to offer was a philosophical lecture.

  “Many mysteries,” Graves went on. “The Builders, of course. What happened to them? What was their physiology, their history, their science? What is the function of the Lens, or of Paradox, or of Flambeau, or of the Phages? Of all the constructs of the Builders, surely the Phages are the most useless. Steven, if permitted, will discourse for many hours on this subject.”

  Rebka nodded again. But, pray God, he won’t.

  “And there are other, more recent mysteries, ones that puzzle me extremely. Think of the Zardalu. A few millennia ago they ruled more than a thousand worlds. We hear from their subject species that they were tyrannical, ruthless, merciless. But as their empire crumbled, those same vassal species rebelled and exterminated every Zardalu. Genocide. Was that not an action more barbaric than any practiced by the Zardalu themselves? And why did they choose to rule as they did? Did they have a different idea of ethical behavior, one unrecognizable to us? If so, they were truly alien, but we will never know in what way. What would an ethical council have made of the Zardalu?”

  …a single ethical council can agree on rules… Rebka saw the sudden agony on Graves’s lined face, and his mind flicked back to that earlier comment. By talking alternative moralities for the Zardalu, was Graves questioning the rules set up by his own council? Was he preparing to disobey his own instructions?

  Graves would not meet Rebka’s eye. “I sometimes wonder if the ethics we favor are just as local and as limited as our common set of body shapes and thought patterns. The Builders had science truly alien to us. It does not match our worldview. We do not know how they built, or why they built. And yet our scientists tell us that there is only one set of physical laws that govern the whole universe — just as our philosophers tell us that we have one system of universal ethics! I wonder if Builder ethics would prove as alien as their science. Or if they, able to see how we treat our many different species, would not be appalled at our bias and misjudgment.

  “I propose that we all have a lesson to learn, Captain, and it is as simple as this: the rules set up by any council must be dynamic. Regardless of the way they are viewed by the average person, they cannot be forever the same, set in stone and steel. We must study them constantly. And we must always ask if they can be improved.”

  Graves glared suddenly at Rebka, turned, and ascended the ramp to the upper level of the capsule.

  Rebka remained seated and stared after him. There had been a counterpoint in those final sentences, almost of two voices. Was it possible that Julius and Steven Graves were holding some kind of interior dialogue, with Rebka no more than bystander? Maybe Julius wanted to do one thing, and Steven another.

  It was preposterous; but no more unlikely than the development of individual consciousness in the mnemonic twin. And if working with Julius Graves on the surface of Quake would be bad, working with an unstable mixture of Julius and Steven would be impossible.

  Twins, squabbling for dominance within one braincase? Rebka stood up, noticing as he did so that the deck offered much less pressure on the soles of his feet. His weight was down to a few pounds. They must be closing on Midway Station. He headed for the ramp, wondering if Max Perry was still sitting in frozen contemplation of Quake. More and more, he felt like the keeper of a bunch of talented lunatics.

  On his first trip to Quake, Rebka had been quite keen to enter and examine Midway Station. Humans had modified and cannibalized it, but it was still Builder technology, and that made it fascinating. Yet when Max Perry had chosen to bypass it — had been driven to bypass it — Rebka, in his own curiosity about Quake, had not argued with that decision.

  Now the urgency to reach Quake was far greater — thirteen Dobelle days to Summertide, according to Rebka’s internal clock; only one hundred and ten hours! Keep moving! — but now Perry insisted on stopping at Midway.

  “Take a look for yourself.” Perry pointed at the status board on their capsule. “See the power consumption? It’s too high.”

  Rebka looked and could deduce nothing. Nor could Graves. If Perry said things did not seem right, the others had to believe him. There was no substitute for experience, and when they were on the Umbilical, Perry’s knowledge reigned supreme.

  “Are we in danger?” Graves asked.

  “Not immediate danger.” Perry was rubbing his nose thoughtfully. “But we can’t risk heading down to Quake until we know why the power use is up. We daren’t risk power loss for our own approach. And the central controls are all on Midway Station. We have to stop there and find out what’s happening.”


  Under his direction, the capsule had already left its invisible guides and turned toward the misshapen bulk that filled half the sky on their left.

  When humans had first discovered it, Midway Station had been an airless, arching vault, three kilometers across and almost empty. The walls were transparent. A man in a space suit could fly to the side facing Opal and detect that he was falling gently in that direction; one strong kick off the glassy outer wall would carry him through the open interior. He would then drift on and on, gradually slowing, until the opposite outer wall finally arrested his motion. The station marked the exact center of mass of the Quake/Opal coupled system.

  The Builders’ uses for Midway Station were not understood. That did not matter to most humans. They had filled the open sphere with a set of interlocking pressurized chambers, making it a temporary habitat and a storage facility for everything from thermal boots to freeze-dried food. Responding to some old cave instinct that favored enclosed spaces, they had also covered the external walls with a shiny, opaque monolayer. After four thousand years of Expansion, humans were apparently still uncomfortable with the open endlessness of space.

  The capsule moved through a first airlock, then nosed molelike along a dark corridor just wide enough to permit its passage. Two minutes later it came to a cylindrical chamber filled with racks of display equipment and control boards.

  Perry waited for a couple of minutes while the interior and exterior pressures were almost matched, then forced open the capsule’s hatch and floated out. By the time the others had followed him he was already at work on one of the displays.

  “Here.” He pointed. “Straightforward enough. That’s the problem. Another car was traveling the Umbilical at the same time as us.”

  “Where?” Rebka stared at the displays. They showed cameras and monitors all along the length of the Umbilical. He saw nothing.

  “No, you won’t see it.” Perry had noticed where Rebka was looking. “The power drain is over now. That means the other capsule isn’t on the Umbilical anymore.”