Summertide hu-1

by Charles Sheffield

  She listened in amazement to her own words. Was it really Darya Lang proposing that? Back on Sentinel Gate she had avoided all heights, telling friends and family with a shiver that she was terrified by them. Apparently everything in the universe was relative. At the moment, the prospect of leaping from a moving and malfunctioning aircar to an Umbilical, a kilometer or more above the ground, did not faze her at all.

  Hans Rebka was following, but only to grip her arm and swing her around. “Wait a minute, Darya. Look.”

  Another aircar was cruising in from the northwest, just below cloud level. It was in a descent pattern, until its pilot apparently saw the Umbilical. Then the car banked and started to ascend in a slow and labored spiral.

  But the foot of the Stalk had begun to rise again, and more rapidly. The two on the ground gazed up helplessly as the Umbilical gradually vanished into the clouds, the pursuing aircar laboring upward after it. As they both disappeared it seemed that the car was losing the race.

  Darya turned to Hans Rebka. “But if Graves and Perry are up there on the Stalk, who’s in the aircar?”

  “It must be Max Perry. I was wrong about him and Graves being on the Umbilical. The Stalk ascent is performing its automatic Summertide retraction, but it’s taking place ahead of time. It has been reprogrammed.” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense, either. Perry is the only one who knows the Umbilical control codes.” He saw her stricken look. “Isn’t he?”

  “No.” She stared away and would not look at him. “Atvar H’sial knew them. All of them. I told you, that’s how we got over from Opal. This is all my fault. I should never have agreed to work with her. Now we’re stuck here, and she’s safe up there on the Umbilical.”

  Hans Rebka glared up at the overcast. “I’ll bet she is. That damned Cecropian. I wondered as we were flying here if she was still on Quake. And J’merlia will be with her. So the aircar up there has to be Perry and Graves.”

  “Or maybe the Carmel twins.”

  “No. They didn’t have access to an aircar. Anyway, we can stop speculating. Here it comes again.”

  The car was spiraling down from the clouds, searching for a good place to touch down. Darya ran toward it and waved her arms frantically. The pilot saw her and carefully banked closer. The aircar flopped to a heavy landing no more than fifty meters away, creating a minor dust storm with its jets of downward air.

  The car door slid open. Hans Rebka and Darya Lang watched in astonishment as two identical and identically dressed humans climbed out, followed by a Lo’tfian and a dusty-looking Hymenopt. Last of all came Julius Graves and Max Perry.

  “We thought you were dead!” “We thought you were on the Umbilical!” “Where did you find them?” “How did you get here?”

  Perry, Rebka, Lang, and Graves were all speaking at once, standing in a tight inward-facing group by the aircar door. The two aliens and the Carmel twins stood apart, staring around them at their desolate surroundings.

  “No active radio beacons — we listened all the way here,” Graves went on. He stared at Darya Lang. “Do you have any idea what has happened to Atvar H’sial?”

  “I’m not sure, but we think she’s probably up there on the Umbilical.”

  “No, she isn’t. No one is. We couldn’t catch it, but we could tell that no capsules are in use. And it’s out of aircar altitude range now. But what about you? I thought Atvar H’sial left you behind on the surface.”

  “She did. Hans Rebka rescued me. But Atvar H’sial must have intended to come back for me, because she gave me supplies and a signal beacon.”

  “No, she didn’t. That was J’merlia’s doing.” Graves gestured at the Lo’tfian. “He says that Atvar H’sial did not forbid him to help you, and so he did. He was very worried about your safety when they left you behind. He said that you seemed poorly equipped for survival on Quake. But then he thought you must be dead, anyway, because when we listened there was no sign of your beacon. I feel sure that Atvar H’sial didn’t intend to go back for you. You were supposed to die on Quake.”

  “But where is Atvar H’sial now?” Rebka asked.

  “We just asked you that question,” Perry said. “She must be with Louis Nenda.”

  “Nenda!”

  “He came here on his own ship,” Graves said. “And did you know he can talk to a Cecropian directly? Kallik told J’merlia that Nenda had a Zardalu augment that lets him use pheromonal communication. He and Atvar H’sial left J’merlia and Kallik behind, and went off somewhere by themselves.”

  “We think they came here. Atvar H’sial had help. Somehow she obtained the control sequences, and she must have set the Umbilical for earlier retraction from the surface.” Hans Rebka gave Darya Lang a “say-no-more” look and went on. “She wants us all dead, stranded on quake at Summertide. That’s why she left J’merlia and Kallik behind — she didn’t want witnesses.”

  “But we heard their distress signal and picked them up.” Perry nodded to the silent aliens. “I think Nenda and H’sial may have intended to come back for them, but they would have been too late. The landing area was molten lava. We had to keep J’merlia and Kallik with us.”

  “But if Nenda made it back to his own ship,” Graves said, “he and Atvar H’sial can still leave the planet.”

  “Which is more than we can do.” After his earlier depression, Rebka had bounced back and was full of energy. “The Umbilical is gone, and it won’t be back until after Summertide. We only have one aircar between the lot of us — ours died as we arrived here. And they can’t achieve orbit anyway, so they’re no answer. Commander Perry, we need a plan for survival here. We’re stuck on Quake until the Umbilical returns.”

  “Can I say it one more time? That’s impossible.” Perry spoke softly, but his grim tone carried more weight than a bellow. “I’ve been trying to impress one fact on you since the day you all arrived at Dobelle: Humans can’t survive Summertide on the surface of Quake. Not even the usual Summertide. Certainly not this Summertide. No matter what you think, there’s no ‘survival plan’ that can save us if we stay on Quake. It’s still pretty quiet here, and I don’t know why. But it can’t last much longer. Anyone on the surface of Quake at Summertide will die.”

  As though the planet had heard him, a distant roar and groan of upthrust earth and grinding rocks followed his words. Moments later a series of rippling shocks blurred the air and shook the ground beneath their feet. Everyone stared around, then instinctively headed for the inside of the aircar and an illusion of safety.

  Darya Lang, the last one in, surveyed the seven who had preceded her.

  It was not a promising group for last-ditch survival schemes. The two Carmel sisters had the look of people already defeated and broken. They had been through too much on Quake; from this point on they would act only as they were directed. Graves and Perry were filthy and battered, clothes torn and rumpled and covered with grime and dust and sweat. They both had bloody and inflamed scratches on their calves, and Graves had another set of scabby wounds along the top of his bald head. Worse than that, he was acting much too cheerful, grinning around him as though all his own troubles were over. Maybe they were. If anyone could save them, it would be Max Perry and not Julius Graves. But after Perry’s gloomy prediction, he had returned to a brooding, introverted silence, seeing something that was invisible to everyone else.

  J’merlia and Kallik seemed fairly normal — but only because Darya did not know how to read in their alien bodies the signs of stress and injury. J’merlia was meticulously removing white dust from his legs, using the soft pads of his forelimbs. He seemed little worried by anything except personal hygiene. Kallik, after a quick shiver along her body that threw a generous layer of powder away from her and produced protests from the rest of the aircar’s occupants, was stretching up to full height and staring bright-eyed at everything. If anyone was still optimistic, maybe it was the little Hymenopt. Unfortunately, only J’merlia could communicate with her.

  Dary
a looked at Hans Rebka. He was obviously exhausted, but he was still their best hope. He had deep red lines on his face, scored by his mask and respirator, and there were owlish pale circles of dust around his eyes. But when he caught her look he managed a grin and a wink.

  Darya squeezed in and had just enough room to slide the door closed. She had never expected to see so many beings, human or alien, in one small aircar. The official capacity was four people. The Carmel twins had managed to fit into one seat, but J’merlia was crouched on the floor where he could see or hear little, and Darya Lang and Max Perry had been left standing.

  “What’s the time?” Rebka asked unexpectedly. “I mean, how many hours to Summertide?”

  “Fifteen.” Perry’s voice was expressionless.

  “So what’s next? We can’t just sit here and wait to die. Anything’s easier than that. Let’s look at our options. We can’t reach the Umbilical, even if it goes no higher. And there’s no place on Quake that we can go to be safe. Suppose we fly as high as we can and ride it out in this car?”

  Kallik gave a series of whistling snorts that sounded to Darya Lang very like derision, while Perry roused himself from his reverie and shook his head. “I went through all those ideas, long ago,” he said gloomily. “We’re down to an eight-hour power supply for the aircar, and that’s with normal load. If we get off the ground — it’s not clear that we can, with so many on board — we’ll be down again before Summertide Maximum.”

  “Suppose we sit here and wait until four or five hours before Summertide,” Rebka suggested. “And then take off? We’d be clear of the surface during the worst time.”

  “Sorry. That won’t work, either.” Perry glared at Kallik, who was bobbing up and down to an accompaniment of clicks and whistles. “We’d never manage to stay in the air. The volcanoes and earthquakes turn the whole atmosphere into one mass of turbulence.” He turned to the Lo’tfian. “J’merlia, tell Kallik to keep quiet. It’s hard enough to think without that noise.”

  The Hymenopt bobbed even higher and whistled, “Sh-sh-sheep.”

  “Kallik asks me to point out,” J’merlia said, “with great respect, you are all forgetting the ship.”

  “Louis Nenda’s ship?” Rebka asked. “The one that Kallik came in? We don’t know where it is. Anyway, Nenda and Atvar H’sial will have taken it.”

  Kallik let loose a louder series of whistles and wriggled her body in anguish.

  “No, no. Kallik says humbly, she is talking about the Summer Dreamboat, the ship that the Carmel twins came in to Quake. We know exactly where that is.”

  “But its drive is exhausted,” Perry said. “Remember, Kallik looked at it when we first found it.”

  “One moment, please.” J’merlia wriggled his way past Julius Graves and the Carmel twins, until he was crouched close to the Hymenopt. The two of them grunted and whistled at each other for half a minute. Finally J’merlia bobbed his head and straightened up.

  “Kallik apologizes to everyone for her extreme stupidity, but she did not make herself sufficiently clear when she examined the ship. The power for the Bose Drive is certainly exhausted, and the ship cannot be used for star travel. But there could be just enough power for one local journey — maybe for one jump to orbit.”

  Rebka was maneuvering past Julius Graves to the pilot’s seat before J’merlia had finished speaking. “How far to that starship, and where is it?” He was examining the car’s status board.

  “Seven thousand kilometers, on a great circle path to the Pentacline Depression.” Perry had emerged from his gloom and was pushing past the Carmel twins to join Rebka. “But this close to Summertide we can expect a sidewind all the way, strong and getting worse. That will knock at least a thousand off our range.”

  “So there’s no margin.” Rebka was doing a quick calculation. “We have enough power for about eight thousand, but not if we try for full speed. And if we slow down, we’ll be flying closer to Summertide, and conditions will be worse.”

  “It is our best chance.” Graves spoke for the first time since entering the aircar. “But can we get off the ground with this much load? We had a hard time getting here, and that was with two people less.”

  “And can we stay in the air, so close to Summertide?” Perry added. “The winds will be incredible.”

  “And even if Kallik is right,” Graves said, “and there is a little power still in the starship, can the Summer Dreamboat make it to orbit?”

  But Rebka was already starting the engine. “It’s not our best chance, Councilor,” he said as the downjets blew a cloud of white dust up to cover the windows. “It’s our only chance. What do you want, a written guarantee? Get set and hold your breath. Unless someone has a better idea in the next five seconds, I’m going to push this car to the limit. Hold tight, and let’s hope the engine wants to cooperate.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Summertide minus one

  As the aircar lurched from the ground and struggled upward, Darya Lang felt useless. She was supercargo, added load, a dumb weight unable to help the pilot or navigator in front of her. Helpless to contribute and unable to relax, she took a new look at her fellow passengers.

  This was the group who would live or die together — and soon, before the rotating dumbbell of Quake and Opal had completed one more turn.

  She studied them as the car droned onward. They were a depressed and depressing sight. The situation had turned back the clock, revealing them to Lang as they must have been long years earlier, before Quake entered their lives.

  Elena and Geni Carmel, sitting cheek to cheek, were little girls lost. Unable to find their way out of the wood, they waited to be saved; or, far more likely, for the monster to arrive. In front of them Hans Rebka was crouched over the controls, a small, worried boy trying to play a game that was too grown-up for him. Next to him sat Max Perry, lost in some old, unhappy dream that he would share with no one.

  Only Julius Graves, to Perry’s right, failed to fit the pattern of backward-turning time. The councilor’s face when he turned to the rear of the car had never been young. Thousands of years of misery were carved in its lines and roughened surface; human history, written dark and angry and desperate.

  She stared at him in bewilderment. This was not the Council member of Alliance legend. Where was the kindness, the optimism, the crackling manic energy?

  She knew the answer: snuffed out, by simple exhaustion.

  For the first time, Darya realized the importance of fatigue in deciding human affairs. She had noticed her own gradual loss of interest in deciphering the riddle of Quake and the Builders, and she had attributed it to her concentration on simple survival. But now she blamed the enervating poisons of weariness and tension.

  The same slow drain of energy was affecting all of them. At a time when thought and prompt action could make the difference between life and death, they were mentally and physically flat. Every one — she was surely no exception — looked like a zombie. They might rise for a few seconds to full attention and alertness, as she had at the moment of takeoff, but as soon as the panic was over they would slump back to lethargy. The faces that turned to her, even with all the white dust wiped off them, were pale and drawn.

  She knew how they were feeling. Her own emotions were on ice. She could not feel terror, or love, or anger. That was the most frightening development, the new indifference to living or dying. She hardly cared what happened next. Over the past few days Quake had not struck her down with its violence, but it had drained her, bled her of all human passions.

  Even the two aliens had lost their usual bounce. Kallik had produced a small computer and was busy with obscure calculations of her own. J’merlia seemed lost and bewildered without Atvar H’sial. He swiveled his head around constantly, as though seeking his lost master, and kept rubbing his hand-pads obsessively over his hard-shelled body.

  Perry, Graves, and Rebka were wedged into the front row, in a seat meant for two. The twins and J’merlia sat behind them, pr
obably more comfortable than anyone else, while Darya Lang and Kallik had squeezed into an area at the rear designed only for baggage. It was tall enough for the Hymenopt, but Kallik had the reflex habit of shaking like a wet dog to remove residual powder from her short black fur. She had Darya sneezing and bending her head forward all the time to avoid contact with the car’s curved roof.

  Worst of all, those in the back could see only a sliver of sky out of the forward window. Information on progress or problems had to come from the warnings and comments of those in front.

  And sometimes they arrived too late.

  “Sorry,” Perry called, two seconds after the car had been slewed, tilted, and dropped fifty meters by a terrific gust of wind. “That was a bad one.”

  Darya Lang rubbed the back of her head and agreed. She had banged it on the hard plastic ceiling of the cargo compartment. There would be a nasty bruise — if she lived so long.

  She leaned forward and cradled her head on her arms. In spite of noise and danger and sickening instability of motion, her thoughts began drifting off. Her previous life as an archeo-scientist on Sentinel Gate now seemed wholly artificial. How many times, in assembling the Lang catalog of artifacts, had she placidly written of whole expeditions, “No survivors”? It was a neat and tidy phrase, one that required no explanation and called for no thought. The element that was missing was the tragedy of the event, and the infinite subjective time that it might have taken to happen. Those “No survivors” entries suggested a clean extinction, a group of people snuffed out as quickly and impartially as a candle flame. Far more likely were situations like the present one: slow extinction of hope as the group clutched at every chance and saw each one fade.

  Darya’s spirits spiraled down further. Death was rarely quick and clean and painless, unless it also came as a surprise. More often it was slow, agonizing, and degrading.