Summertide hu-1

by Charles Sheffield

  Darya turned her head and saw the blunt lines of a Zardalu Communion vessel swooping in close to them. Concealed weapons ports sprang open on the ship’s forward end.

  The Dreamboat was the target — and at that range, there was no way the other ship could miss.

  Darya watched in horror as all the weapons fired. She expected their ship to disintegrate around her. But impossibly, the attacking beams were veering away from their expected straight lines. They missed the Dreamboat completely and curved into space, drawn to meet the black sphere as it hung suspended on its golden thread of light.

  The beams of the ship’s weapons remained visible as glowing trajectories in space, coupling the Zardalu vessel with the dark ascending globe. The curved lines shortened. The other ship moved closer to the distorted dark region, as though the sphere were reeling in bright strands from the weapons.

  But the Zardalu ship was not going willingly. Its drive flared to the brighter violet of maximum intensity, thrusting away from the sphere’s dark singularity. Darya could sense the struggle of huge opposed forces.

  And the starship was losing. Caught in the field’s curvature, it moved along the twisting lines of force, drawn irresistibly toward the rising sphere. The sphere itself was moving upward, faster and faster. It seemed to Darya that the Zardalu vessel was sucked into that black void, one moment before the sphere itself flashed up the yellow thread and disappeared.

  Then the Summer Dreamboat was moving on, around the curve of Quake. Gargantua sank below the horizon, and with it all sign of the pulsing beam of yellow.

  “I don’t know if anyone cares anymore.” It was Rebka’s laconic voice, startling Darya back to an awareness of where she was. “But I just checked the chronometer. Summertide Maximum took place a few seconds ago. And we’re in orbit.”

  Darya turned to look down at Quake. There was nothing to see but dark, endless clouds and, beyond them, on the horizon, the blue-gray sphere of Opal.

  Summertide. It was over. And it had been nothing like she had imagined. She glanced over at the others, still rubbing their eyes as they lay on the starship floor, and felt a terrible sense of letdown. To see everything — but to understand nothing! The whole visit to Quake at Summertide was an unsolved mystery, a waste of time and human lives.

  “The good news is that we reached orbit.” Rebka was speaking again, and Darya could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “The bad news is that the fancy flying we had to do a few moments ago took what little power we had left. We probably have Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial to thank for that. I don’t have any idea what was going on back there, or what happened to that other ship, and I really don’t care. I hope Nenda and H’sial got their comeuppance, but right now I don’t have time to bother with it. I’m worried about us. Without power, we can’t make a planetary landing on Opal, or on Quake, or anywhere else. Commander Perry is working up a trajectory that may take us to Midway Station. If we get lucky we might be able to ride the Umbilical from there.”

  Working up a trajectory, Darya thought. How can he? Perry doesn’t have hands, just burned bits of meat.

  But he’ll do it, hands or no hands. And if his foot were burned like mine, he’d walk on it. He’d run on it, too, if he had to. Hans Rebka talks of luck, but they’ve not had much of that. They’ve had to make their own.

  I’ll never mock the Phemus Circle again. Their people are dirty and disgusting and poor and primitive, but Rebka and Perry and the rest of them have something that makes everyone in the Alliance seem half-dead. They have the will to live, no matter what happens.

  And then, because she was becoming steadily more relaxed and sluggish in response to the anesthetic and mildly toxic fluid that Kallik had injected, and because Darya Lang could never stop thinking, even when she wanted to, her mind said to her: “Umbilical. We’re going to the Umbilical.”

  The least of the Builder artifacts; she knew that, everyone knew that. An insignificant nothing of a structure, on the Builder scale of things. But it was to that very place, to that least of all artifacts, and to that very time, of Summertide Maximum, that all the other Builder artifacts had pointed.

  Why? Why not point to one of the striking artifacts — to Paradox or Sentinel, to Elephant or Cocoon or Lens?

  Now there’s a worthwhile mystery, Darya thought: a puzzle that someone could usefully ponder. Let’s forget the mess we’re in and think about that for a while. I can’t help Rebka and Perry, and anyway I don’t need to. They’ll take care of me. So let’s think.

  Let’s wonder about the two spheres that came out from the deep interior of Quake. How long had they been there? Why were they there? Where did they go? Why did they choose this moment to emerge, and what made the black one take the Zardalu ship with it?

  The questions went unanswered. As Kallik’s narcotic venom spread steadily through her bloodstream, Darya was sinking toward unconsciousness. There was too little time left for thinking. Her concentration was gone, her energy was gone, and her brain drifted randomly from one subject to another. Drugged sleep was moments away.

  But in the last moment, the single second before her mind vanished into vague emptiness, Darya caught the gleam of a new insight. She understood the significance of Quake and Summertide! She knew its function, and maybe their own role in it. She reached out for the thought, struggled to pull it to her, sought to fix it firmly in her memory.

  It was too late. Darya, still fighting, floated irresistibly into sleep.

  CHAPTER 23

  Rebka woke like a nervous animal, jerking upright and alert from a sound sleep. In that first moment his feelings were all panic.

  He had made the fatal mistake of allowing his concentration to lapse. Who was flying the ship?

  The only other person halfway competent was Max Perry, and he was too badly injured to take the controls. They could smash into Opal, fall back to the surface of Quake, or lose themselves forever in deep space.

  Then, before his eyes opened, he knew things had to be all right.

  No one was flying the ship. No one needed to. He was not on the Summer Dreamboat — he could not be. For he was not in freefall. And the forces on him were not the wild, turbulent ones of atmospheric reentry. Instead there was a steady downward pull, the fraction-of-a-gee acceleration that told of a capsule moving along the Umbilical.

  He opened his eyes and remembered the final hours of their flight. They had meandered out to Midway Station like drunken sailors, the sorriest collection of humans and aliens that the Dobelle system had ever seen. He remembered biting his lips and fingertips until they bled, forcing himself to stay awake and his eyes to stay open. He had followed Perry’s half-incoherent navigational instructions as best he could, while they tacked for five long hours along the line of the Umbilical. With the help of the tiny attitude-control jets — the only power left on board the Dreamboat — he had brought them to a dazed docking at the station’s biggest port.

  He recalled the approach — a disgrace for any pilot. It had taken five times as long as it should. And as the last docking confirmation was received at the ship, he had leaned back in the pilot’s chair and closed his eyes — for one moment’s rest.

  And then?

  And then his memory failed. He looked around.

  He must have fallen asleep at the very second of final contact. Someone had carried him into Midway Station and moved him to the service level of an Umbilical capsule. They had secured him in a harness and left him there.

  He was not alone. Max Perry, his forearms caked and daubed with protective yellow gel, drifted on a light tether a few feet away. He was unconscious. Darya Lang hovered beyond him, her flowing brown hair tied back from her face. The clothing had been stripped from her left leg below the knee, and plastic flesh covered her burned foot and ankle. Her breathing was light. Every few seconds she muttered under her breath as though about to surface from sleep. With her face so relaxed and thought-free, she looked about twelve years old. Next to Darya floated Geni Ca
rmel. From the look of her she was also heavily sedated, although she had no visible injuries.

  Rebka checked his wristwatch: twenty-three hours past Summertide. All the fireworks in the Quake and Opal system should be safely in the past. And for seventeen hours, he had been out of things completely.

  He rubbed at his eyes, noticing that his face was no longer covered with ash and grime. Someone had not only carried him to the capsule, but had washed him and changed his clothes before leaving him to sleep. Who had done that? And who had provided the medical care to Perry and Lang?

  That brought him back to his first question: with the four of them unconscious, who was minding the store?

  He had trouble getting his feet to the floor and then found that he could not loose the harness that secured him. Even after seventeen hours of rest, he was weary enough for his fingers to be clumsy and fumbling. If Darya Lang looked like a teenager, he felt like a battered centenarian.

  Finally he freed himself and was able to leave the improvised hospital. He considered trying to wake Perry and Lang — she still murmuring to herself in a protesting voice — and then decided against it. Almost certainly they had been anesthetized before their wounds were dressed and synthetic skin applied.

  He slowly climbed the stairs that led to the observation-and-control deck of the capsule. The clear roof of the upper chamber showed Midway Station in the middle distance. Far above, confirming that the capsule was descending toward Opal, Rebka saw the distant prospect of Quake, dark-clouded and brooding.

  The walls of the observation deck, ten meters high, were paneled with display units. Julius Graves, seated at the control console and flanked by J’merlia and Kallik, was watching in thoughtful silence. The succession of broadcast displays that Graves was receiving showed a planetary surface — but it was Opal, not Quake.

  Rebka watched for a while before announcing his presence. With their attention on Quake, it had been easy to forget Opal had also experienced the biggest Summertide in human history. Aerial and orbital radar shots, piercing the cloud layers of the planet, showed broad stretches of naked seabed laid bare by millennial tides. Muddy ocean floor was spotted with vast green backs: dead Dowsers, the size of mountains, lay stranded and crushed under their own weight.

  Other videos showed the Slings of Opal disintegrating as contrary waves, miles high and driven by the tidal forces, pulled at and twisted the ocean’s surface.

  An emotionless voice-over from Opal listed the casualties: half the planet’s population known dead, most in the past twenty-four hours; another fifth still missing. But even before assessment was complete, reconstruction was beginning. Every human on Opal was on a continuous work schedule.

  The broadcasts made clear to Rebka that the people of Opal had their hands more than full. If his group were to land there, they should not look for assistance.

  He drifted forward and tapped Graves lightly on the shoulder. The councilor jerked at the touch, swiveled in his chair, and grinned up at him.

  “Aha! Back from Dreamland! As you see, Captain—” He flourished a thin hand upward, and then to the display screens. “Our decision to spend Summertide on Quake rather than Opal was not so unwise after all.”

  “If we’d stayed on the surface of Quake for Summertide, Councilor, we’d have been ashes. We were lucky.”

  “We were luckier than you think. And long before Summertide.” Graves gestured to Kallik, who was manipulating displays with one forelimb and entering numbers into a pocket computer with another. “According to our Hymenopt friend, Opal suffered worse than Quake. Kallik has been doing energy-balance calculations in every spare moment since we left the surface. She agrees with Commander Perry — the surface should have been far more active than it was during the Grand Conjunction. The full energy was never released while we were there. Some focused storage-and-release mechanism was at work for the tidal energies. Without it, the planet would have been uninhabitable for humans long before we left it. But with it, most of the energy went to some other purpose.”

  “Councilor, Quake was quite bad enough. Elena Carmel is dead. Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda may be dead, too.”

  “They are.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I don’t know if you realize this, but they were in orbit around Quake at Summertide and they tried to blow us out of the sky. They deserved what they got. But why are you so sure they’re dead?”

  “Darya Lang saw Nenda’s ship dragged off toward Gargantua with an acceleration too much for any human or Cecropian to survive. They had to be crushed flat inside it.”

  “Nenda’s ship had a full star drive. No local field should have held it.”

  “If you wish to argue that point, Captain, you’ll have to do it with Darya Lang. She saw what happened; I did not.”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Still? She became unconscious again when J’merlia started work on her foot, but I am surprised she is not waking.” Graves turned in annoyance. “Now then, what do you want?”

  J’merlia was hesitantly touching his sleeve, while by his side Kallik was hopping and whistling in excitement.

  “With great respect, Councilor Graves.” J’merlia moved to kneel before him. “But Kallik and I could not help hearing what you said to Captain Rebka — that Master Nenda and Atvar H’sial escaped from Quake, then they were hurtled off to Gargantua and crushed by the acceleration.”

  “Toward Gargantua, my Lo’tfian friend. Perhaps not to Gargantua itself. Professor Lang was quite insistent on the point.”

  “With apologies, I should have said toward Gargantua. Honored Councilor, would it be possible for Kallik and my humble self to be excused from duties for a few minutes?”

  “Oh, go on. And don’t grovel, you know I hate it.” Graves waved them away. As the aliens headed for the capsule’s lower level, he turned back to Rebka.

  “Well, Captain, unless you want to collapse again into slumber, I propose that we go below ourselves and check on Commander Perry and Professor Lang. We have plenty of time. The Umbilical will not offer access to Opal for another few hours. And our official work in the Dobelle system is over.”

  “Yours may be. Mine is not.”

  “It will be, Captain, very soon.” The grinning skeleton was as infuriatingly casual and self-assured as ever.

  “You don’t even know what my real work is.”

  “Ah, but I do. You were sent to find out what was wrong with Commander Perry, see what it was that kept him in a dead-end job in the Dobelle system — and cure him.”

  Rebka sank into a seat in front of the control console. “Now how the devil did you find that out?” His voice was puzzled rather than annoyed.

  “From the obvious place — Commander Perry. He has his own friends and information sources, back in the headquarters of the Phemus Circle. He learned why you were sent here.”

  “Then he should also know that I never did find out. I told you, my job is unfinished.”

  “Not true. Your official job is almost over, and it will be done with very soon. You see, Captain, I know what happened to Max Perry seven years ago. I suspected it before we came to Quake, and I confirmed it when I queried the commander under sedation. All it took were the right questions. And I know what to do. Trust me, and listen.”

  Julius Graves hauled his long body over to a monitor, pulled a data unit the size of a sugar cube from his pocket, and inserted it into the machine. “This is sound only, of course. But you will recognize the voice, even though it appears much younger. I sent his memory back seven years. I will play only a fragment. No purpose is served by making private suffering into a public event.”

  …Amy was still acting goofy and playful, even in the heat. She was laughing as she ran on ahead of me, back toward the car that would take us to the Umbilical. It was only a few hundred meters away, but I was getting tired.

  “Hey, slow down. I’m the one who has to carry the equipment.”

  She spun around, teasing me. “Oh, come on, Max
. Learn to have some fun. You don’t need any of that stuff. Leave it here — nobody will ever notice it’s gone.”

  She made me smile, in spite of the growing noise around us and the sweat that covered my body. Quake was hot.”

  “I can’t do that Amy — it’s official property. It all has to be accounted for. Wait for me.”

  But she just laughed. And danced on — on into that funny blurring of the surface, the fragile, shimmering ground of Summertide…

  …before I could get near her, she was gone. Just like that, in a fraction of a second. Swallowed up by Quake. All that I could take back with me was the pain…

  “There is more, but it adds nothing.” Graves stopped the recording. “Nothing that you cannot guess, or should not hear. Amy died in molten lava, not in boiling mud. Max Perry saw that shimmering of heated air again, in the Pentacline Depression — but too late to save Elena Carmel.”

  Hans Rebka shrugged. “Even if you know what drove Max Perry into his shell, that’s not the hardest part of my job. I’m supposed to cure him, and I don’t know where to begin.”

  Rebka knew that his present sense of failure and incompetence should be only temporary, no more than a side effect of exhaustion following days of tension. But that did not make it any less real.

  He stared at one of the wall displays, which showed a Sling floating upside down and shattered by the impact of mighty seas. All that could be seen was a wilderness of black, slippery mud from which jutted random tangles of roots. He wondered if anyone could possibly have survived when the Sling capsized.

  “How?” he went on. “How do you pull someone out of a seven-year depression? I don’t know that.”

  “Of course you don’t. That’s my area of expertise, not yours.” Graves turned abruptly and headed for the stairway. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “Time to see what’s going on below decks. I think those pesky aliens are plotting a mutiny, but we’ll ignore that for the moment. Right now we have to talk to Max Perry.”