Summertide hu-1

by Charles Sheffield

  It was not happening. And he was baffled.

  There were local eruptions — that was undeniable. But when he looked at the ground speeding beneath him, he could see nothing to match the scale of his imaginings.

  What was wrong?

  Rebka and Perry had overlooked a fact known since the time of Newton: gravity is a body force. No known material can shield against it; every particle, no matter where it may be in the universe, feels the gravitational force of every other particle.

  And so, whereas nuclear war confines its fury to the atmosphere, oceans, and top few tens of meters of a planet’s land surface, the tidal forces squeeze, pull, and twist every cubic centimeter of the world. They are distributed forces, felt from the top of the atmosphere to the innermost atom of the superheated, superpressured core.

  Rebka examined the surface but saw little to suggest a coming Armageddon. His mistake was natural, and elementary. He should have been looking much deeper; and then he might have had his first inkling of the true nature of Summertide.

  A wind of choking dust was screaming across the surface as the aircar came in to land. Rebka brought the car directly into that gale, relying on microwave sensors to warn of rocks big enough to cause trouble. The final landing was smooth enough, but there was an immediate problem. The search-and-rescue system told him that the distress beacon was right in front of him, less than thirty meters away. But the mass detector insisted that nothing the size of an aircar or a ship was closer than three hundred. Peering into the dust storm did not help. The world in front of the car ended with a veil of driving dust and sand, no more than a dozen paces beyond the car’s nose.

  Rebka checked the SAR system again. No doubt about the location of the beacon. He gauged its line and distance from the door of the car. He forced himself to sit down and wait for five minutes, listening to the sandstorm as it screamed and buffeted at the car and hoping that the wind would drop. It blew on, as strongly as ever. Visibility was certainly not improving. Finally he pulled on goggles, respirator, and heat-resistant clothing, and eased open the door. At least the combination was a familiar one. Howling wind, superheated atmosphere, foul-tasting and near-poisonous air — just like home. He had grappled with all that in his childhood on Teufel.

  He stepped outside.

  The wind-driven sand was unbelievable, so fine-grained that it could find a way through the most minute of gaps in the suit. It blasted and caught at his body. He could taste powdery talc on his lips in the first few seconds, somehow creeping in through the respirator. Millions of tiny, scrabbling fingers touched him and tugged at his suit, each one eager to pull him away. His spirits dropped. This was worse than Teufel. Without the shelter of a car, how could anyone survive such conditions for even an hour? It was a side of Quake that Perry, in his preoccupation with volcanoes and earthquakes, had not warned about. But given enough atmospheric disturbance, interior activity of a planet was not necessary to make it inhospitable to life. Blown sand that would allow a person to neither breathe nor escape would do the trick nicely.

  Rebka made sure that he had a return line attached firmly to the body of the aircar, then leaned into the wind and crept forward. The beacon finally appeared when it was less than four meters in front of him. No wonder the mass sensors had not registered it! It was tiny — a stand-alone unit and the smallest one he had ever seen. It measured no more than thirty centimeters square and a few centimeters thick, with a stubby antenna sticking up from its center. The solid cairn of stones on which it nestled stood at the top of a small rise in the ground. Someone had taken the trouble to make sure that, weak as it was, the beacon would be heard over the maximum possible range.

  Someone. But who, and where? If they had left the beacon and headed for refuge on foot, their chances were grim. An unprotected human would not make a hundred meters. They would suffocate, unable to avoid that choking, driving wind.

  But maybe they had recorded what they were doing. Every distress beacon carried a message cache in its base. If they had been gone just a few minutes…

  Wishful thinking, Rebka told himself as he removed his glove and reached for the sliding plate at the bottom of the beacon. He had been receiving the distress signal for an hour. And who knew how long it had been sending out its cry for help before he heard it?

  He put his hand in the narrow opening. As his fingertips touched the base, a gigantic bolt of pain shot up his hand, along his arm, and on through his whole body. His muscles convulsed and knotted, too quickly and tightly to permit a scream. He could not pull his hand free. He doubled up, helpless, over the distress beacon.

  Neural convolver, his mind said in the moment before the next shock hit him, harder than the first. He could no longer draw breath. In the seconds before he became unconscious, Rebka’s mind filled with anger. Anger at the whole stupid assignment, anger at Quake — but most of all, anger at himself.

  He had done something supremely dumb, and it was going to kill him. Atvar H’sial was dangerous, and at large on the surface of Quake. He had known that before he landed. And still he had blundered along like a child at a picnic, never bothering with the most elementary precautions…

  But I was trying to help.

  So what? His brain rejected that excuse as the jolting current twisted his body and scrambled his brains for a third and final time. You’ve said it often enough: people who are stupid enough to get themselves killed never help anybody…

  And now, damn it, he would never know what Quake looked like at Summertide. The planet had won; he had lost…

  The dust-filled wind screamed in triumph about his unconscious body.

  ARTIFACT: ELEPHANT

  UAC#: 859

  Galactic Coordinates: 27,548.762/16,297.442/ — 201.33

  Name: Elephant Star/planet association: Cam H’ptiar/Emserin

  Bose Access Node: 1121 Estimated age: 9.223 ±0.31 Megayears

  Exploration History: Discovered by remote observation in E. — 4553, reached and surveyed by a Cecropian exploration fleet in E. — 3227. Members of the same fleet performed the first entry to Elephant and measured its physical parameters (see below). Subsequent survey teams performed the first complete traverse of Elephant (E. — 2068), attempted communication with elephant (E. — 1997, E. — 1920, E. — 1883, all unsuccessful), and removed and tested large samples from the body (E. -1882, E. -1551). Slow changes in physical parameters and appearance were reported on each successive visit, and a permanent Cecropian observation station (Elephant Station) was established on Emserin, four light-minutes distant, in E. — 1220. Human observers were added to Elephant Station for the first time 2,900 years later, in E. 1668. This artifact has been continuously monitored for more than five thousand standard years.

  Physical Description: Elephant is an elongated and amorphous gaseous mass, approximately four thousand kilometers in maximum dimension and nowhere wider than nine hundred kilometers. It is in fact not a true gas, but a wholly interconnected mass of stable polymer fibers and transfer ducts. The interior is highly conducting (mainly superconducting) of both heat and electricity.

  Applied stimuli suggest that the whole body reacts to any external influence but begins the return to its original condition with a first response time of about twenty years. Physical repair is by subsection replication, and any incident materials (e.g. cometary fragments) are employed catabolically and anabolically to synthesize needed components. Local temperature changes are corrected to the mean body temperature of 1.63 Kelvins, consistent with the use of liquid helium II as a heat-transfer agent. The necessary cooling mechanism to maintain subunits of Elephant below 2 Kelvins is unclear.

  Holes in Elephant (included excised fragments up to twenty kilometers long and complete longitudinal transects) are replaced from within, with a small matching reduction of overall dimensions. The external shape is held constant, and the impression of an amorphous body is obviously misleading. Unless material is added, or removed from the body, both the size and shape of
Elephant are invariant to within fractions of a millimeter in any direction.

  Intended Purposes: Is Elephant alive? Is Elephant conscious? That debate continues. Today’s consensus is that Elephant is a single active artifact with a limited self-renewal capability. Any removed section slowly becomes inert, its conductivity diminishes, and the system loses its homeostatic character. If Elephant is alive, the full response time to external stimuli is very long (hundreds of years) and the implied metabolic rate correspondingly slow.

  Regardless of this artifact’s overall self-awareness, it is certainly true that Elephant can function, as a whole or in part, as a general-purpose computing device. Following the pioneering work of Demerle and T’russig, Elephant has been used extensively in applications requiring enormous storage and moderate computing speed.

  If Elephant is an intelligent and self-aware entity, the notion of purposes and uses is inappropriate. More sophisticated tests for self-awareness are clearly needed.

  —From the Lang Universal Artifact Catalog. Fourth Edition.

  CHAPTER 16

  Summertide minus seven

  “It’s like a treasure hunt,” Graves said. He was walking on ahead, slow and steady. With his hands clasped behind him and his relaxed manner, he was like a thoughtful skeleton out for a midday stroll. “The old party game. You remember?”

  Max Perry stared after him. He had grown up on a world too harsh and marginal to permit the luxury of children’s games and children’s parties. Food had been his best treasure. And the best game that he could think of at the moment was survival.

  “You get clues,” Graves went on. “First the beacon. Then the pointer, then the mystery caves. And then — if you’re lucky — the treasure!”

  The aircar had landed on a crumbling and eroded plateau in the wilderness area between the Thousand Lakes and the outer boundary of the Pentacline Depression. In that no-man’s-land the soft rock had been eaten away into deep tunnels and smooth-sided sinkholes, like soft putty that an aged giant had kneaded and poked with bent, arthritic fingers. The meters-wide holes ran haphazardly at all angles from the surface. Some dived almost vertically; others sloped so shallowly that they could be walked down with ease.

  “Be careful!” Perry hated Graves’s casual attitude. “You don’t know how shaky the edges might be — and you don’t know what could be at the bottom! This whole area is an estivation zone for Quake wildlife.”

  “Relax. It’s perfectly safe.” Graves took a step closer to the edge of one of the holes, then had to jump smartly backward as the rock crumbled and slid away beneath his feet. “Perfectly safe,” he repeated. “This isn’t the hole that we want anyway. Just follow me.”

  He led the way forward again, skirting the dangerous area. Perry followed at what he hoped was a safe distance. Expecting another car, perhaps a crashed one, at the site of the distress call, both men had been surprised to find nothing there but an isolated radio beacon. Next to it, marked as a black line in the chalky white rock, was an arrow. It pointed straight toward the dark, steep tunnel on whose brink Graves was currently poised and leaning precariously forward. Alongside the arrow, in an ill-formed scrawl, were the words “In Here.”

  “Fascinating.” Graves leaned farther. “It seems to me—”

  “Don’t go so near!” Perry exclaimed when Graves moved forward again. “That edge there, if it’s like the other one…”

  “Oh, phooey.” Graves jumped up and down. “See, solid as the Alliance. And I read the report before I came to Dobelle — there are no dangerous animals on Quake.”

  “Sure, you read the report, but I wrote the damned thing. There’s a lot we don’t know about Quake.” Perry advanced cautiously to the brink of the tunnel and peered down. The rock seemed firm enough, and quite old. On Quake that was a good sign. The surface here at least had a certain permanence, as though it had avoided the turmoil that hit the planet at Summertide. “Anyway, it’s not just animals. Mud pools can be just as bad. You don’t even know how deep this hole is. Before you start charging down there, at least take a sounding.”

  He picked up a fist-sized chunk of chalky stone and lobbed it down the line of the tunnel. Both men leaned forward, listening for an echo where it struck the bottom. There was a two-second silence, then a thud, a whoof of protest, and a surprised whistle.

  “Ah-ha! That’s not a rock or a mud pool.” Graves snapped his fingers and started to scramble on his bottom down the steep-sided hole. He had a flashlight, and he was shining it along in front of him. “That’s the Carmel twins down there. I told you what to expect, Commander — the beacon, the arrow, the cave, and then the—” He halted. “And then… well, well, well. We were wrong.”

  Perry, a few steps behind, craned to see past Graves. The narrow beam of the flashlight reflected from a line of bright black eyes. As Graves held the light steady a small body, its black fur dusted to gray by a coating of fine powder, moved slowly up the incline. The Hymenopt was rubbing her tubby midsection with a foreleg, and while they watched she shook herself like a drenched dog and threw off a cloud of white dust.

  There was another whistle, and a click-click-click of jointed hind limbs.

  “Kallik offers respect and obedience,” a familiar, sibilant voice said. J’merlia was emerging from around the curve of the tunnel. He, too, was completely coated with fine talc. “She is a loyal slave and servant. She asks, why do you throw stones at her? Did her master command it?”

  The Lo’tfian’s narrow face was not equipped to register human emotions, but there was a puzzled and worried tone in his voice. Instead of answering, Graves slithered farther along the tunnel to where it leveled off as a small cave whose floor was covered with powdered gypsum. He stared at the cleared area, and then at the little pile of objects standing in the middle of it.

  “You were here in the dark?”

  “No.” J’merlia’s compound eyes glittered in the flashlight beam. “It is not dark. We can both see here fairly well. Do you need our assistance?”

  Perry, who had followed Graves down the tunnel at his own pace, pushed past the other man and reached up high to touch the tunnel’s roof. “See those? Cracks. Recent ones. I’m sure we shouldn’t stay any longer. What are you doing down here, J’merlia?”

  “Why, we are waiting. As we were instructed to do.” The Lo’tfian offered a rapid set of whistles to Kallik, then continued. “Our masters brought us here and told us to await their return. Which we are doing.”

  “Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda?”

  “Of course. Owners never change.”

  “So Nenda didn’t fly home in a huff. When did your masters leave?”

  “Two days ago. We stayed at first on the surface, but we did not like conditions there — too hot, too open, too hard to breathe. But here, snug underground—”

  “Snug, while the roof is ready to fall in. When did they say they would be back?”

  “They did not say. Why should they? We have food; we have water; we are safe here.”

  “Don’t bother to ask any more, Commander.” Graves, done with his inventory of the little cavern, sank to his knees and began rubbing at eyes irritated by the fine dust that flew up at every movement. “Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda would not have provided their itinerary, or anything else, to J’merlia. Why should they, as J’merlia says? To make it easier for you or me to follow them? No.” His voice dropped to a stage whisper. “If they ever intended to come back for them at all! Maybe they have abandoned them. But even that is not the right question. The real question, one that I ask myself and do not like the answer to, is this: Where did H’sial and Nenda go? Where did they go, on Quake near Summertide, where they could not or would not take J’merlia and Kallik with them?”

  As though answering his question, there was a tremor through the floor of the cave. The minor quake left the roof intact, but a cloud of fine white powder flew up to cover all of them.

  “I don’t care — ough! — where they went.” Perry ha
d trouble holding back his coughs. “I care about us, and where we go next.”

  “We go to find the Carmel twins.” Graves rubbed the white powder away from his eyes again and looked like a circus clown.

  “Sure. Where? And when?” Perry was aware of the running clock, even if Graves was not. “It’s only fifty-five hours to Summertide.”

  “Ample time.”

  “No. You think, fifty-five hours, and you imagine that you’ll be all right until then. That’s totally wrong. Anybody who is still on the surface of Quake five hours or even fifteen hours from Summertide is probably dead. If we don’t find the twins soon — in the next ten to twelve hours — they’re dead, too. Because we’ll have to give up the search and head back to the Umbilical.”

  Perry was finally getting through to the councilor. Graves stood, bald head bowed, and sighed in agreement. “All right. We don’t have time to argue. Let’s look for the twins.”

  “What about these two?” Perry gestured at Kallik and J’merlia.

  “They come with us. Naturally. Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda may never come back, or they may be too late, or they may not be able to track that beacon — you said it was running low on power.”

  “It is. I agree, we can’t just leave the aliens. There’s enough room in the car for all of us.” Perry turned to J’merlia and Kallik. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  When the others did not move, he reached out for one of J’merlia’s slender black forelimbs and started toward the tunnel entrance. Surprisingly, the Lo’tfian resisted.

  “With respect, Commander Perry.” J’merlia dug in six of his feet and cowered down until his slender abdomen was touching the rocky floor. “Humans are much greater beings than me or Kallik, we know that, and we will seek to do whatever you tell us. But Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda gave us orders to stay in this area. We must wait until they return.”