Was Graves going crazy again? Rebka sighed. Oh, for the good old days, when he was flying through Quake’s clouds and wondering if they would survive another second of turbulence. He followed close behind the other man, down to the second level of the capsule.
J’merlia and Kallik were nowhere to be seen.
“I told you,” Graves said. “They’re down in the cargo hold. Those two are up to something, sure as taxes. Give me a hand here.”
With Rebka’s puzzled assistance, the councilor carried Max Perry and then Geni Carmel back to the upper level of the capsule. Darya Lang, still muttering to herself on the brink of consciousness, was left in her securing harness.
Graves placed Max Perry and Geni Carmel in seats at ninety degrees to each other and fixed them in position.
“Put extra bindings on those harnesses,” he said to Rebka. “Make sure you don’t touch Perry’s injured arms — but remember I don’t want either of them to be able to get loose. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Graves made one final trip to the lower level. When he reappeared he was carrying two spray hypodermics in his right hand.
“Darya Lang is waking up,” he said, “but let’s get this taken care of first. It won’t take long.” He injected Perry in the shoulder with one syringe and Geni Carmel with the other. “Now, we can begin.” He began to count aloud.
The wake-up shot given to Max Perry was full strength. Before Graves had reached ten, Perry sighed, rolled his head from side to side, and slowly opened his eyes. He stared around the capsule’s cabin with a dull and disinterested look, until his gaze found the still-unconscious Geni Carmel. Then he groaned and closed his eyes again.
“You are awake,” Graves said in a reproving tone. “So don’t you go falling asleep again. I have a problem, and I need your help.”
Perry shook his head, and his eyes remained shut.
“We’ll be back on Opal in a few hours,” Graves went on. “And life will start to return to normal. But I have the responsibility for the rehabilitation of Geni Carmel. Now, there must be formal hearings, back on Shasta and on Miranda, but that cannot be allowed to interfere with the rehab program. It has to begin at once. And the death of Elena makes the program very difficult. I feel it would be disastrous to let Geni go back to Shasta, with all its memories of her twin sister, until she is already on the road to recovery. On the other hand I myself must return to Shasta, and then go on to Miranda for the formal genocide hearing.”
He paused. Perry still had not opened his eyes.
Graves leaned close and lowered his voice. “So that leaves me with two questions to answer. Where should the rehabilitation of Geni Carmel begin? And who should oversee the rehab process, if I will not be around?
“That is where I need your help, Commander. I have decided that Geni’s rehab program should begin on Opal. And I propose to make you her guardian while it is proceeding.”
At last Graves had broken through. Perry jerked bolt upright in the restraining harness. His bloodshot eyes opened wide. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I thought I was clear enough.” Graves was smiling. “But let me say it again. Geni will remain on Opal for at least four more months. You will be responsible for her welfare while she is there.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I’m afraid you’re wrong. Ask Captain Rebka if you doubt me. In matters like this, a Council member has full authority to proceed with prompt rehabilitation. And anyone can be pressed into service. That includes you.”
Perry glared at Rebka, then back at Graves. “I won’t do it. I have my own work — a full-time job. And she needs a specialist.
I have no idea how to deal with her sort of problem.”
“You can certainly learn.” Graves nodded at the other chair, where Geni was slowly waking in response to her weaker injection. “She’s starting to listen now. As a first move, you can tell her about Opal. Remember, Commander, she has never been there. It’s going to be her home for a while, and you know as much about it as anyone.”
“Wait a minute!” Perry was struggling at his harness and calling to Graves, who was already ushering Rebka out of the chamber. “We’re tied in. You can’t leave us like this! Look at her.”
Geni Carmel was making no effort to escape from her harness, but tears were trickling down her pale cheeks, and she was staring in horror or fascination at Perry’s mutilated hands and forearms.
“Sorry,” Graves said over his shoulder as he and Rebka started down toward the lower level of the capsule. “We’ll discuss this more later, but I can’t do it now. Captain Rebka and I have something very urgent to take care of on the lower deck. We’ll be back.”
Rebka waited until they were out of earshot before he spoke again to Graves. “Are you serious about any of that?”
“I am serious about all of it.”
“It won’t work. Geni Carmel is just a child. With Elena dead, she doesn’t even want to live. You know how close they were, so close they would die rather than be separated from each other. And Perry is a basket case himself — he’s in no shape to look after her.”
Julius Graves halted at the bottom of the stairway. He turned to look up at Hans Rebka, and for once his face was neither grinning nor grimacing. “Captain, when I need a man who can fly an overloaded, power-drained ship like the Summer Dreamboat off a planet that is falling apart underneath us, and take me into space, I’ll come to you anytime. You are very good at your job — your real job. Can’t you do me the favor of admitting that the same could be true of me? Isn’t it conceivable that I might do my job well?”
“But that isn’t your job.”
“Which only shows, Captain, how little you know of the duties of a Council member. Believe me, what I am doing will work. Or would you prefer a wager? I say that Max Perry and Geni Carmel have more chance of curing each other than you or I have of doing anything useful for either of them. As you said, she is just a child who needs help — but Perry is a man who desperately needs to give help. He’s been doing penance for seven years for his sin in allowing Amy to go with him to Quake during Summertide. Don’t you realize that burning his arms like that will help his mental condition? Now he has a chance to obtain total absolution. And your job on Opal is finished. You could leave today, and Perry would be fine.” Graves snapped his fingers and held out his hand to Rebka. “Would you like to bet on that? Name the amount.”
Rebka was saved from a reply by an angry voice ahead of them.
“I don’t know who to thank for this, and I’m not about to ask. But will someone get me the hell out of here! I have work to do.”
It was Darya Lang, fully conscious and struggling to free herself from the harness. She sounded nothing like the shy theoretical scientist who had first arrived on Opal, but her practical skills were still lacking. In her efforts to free herself she had managed to tangle the bindings, so that she was hanging upside down and could hardly move her arms.
“She’s all yours, Captain,” Graves said unexpectedly. “I’m going to find J’merlia and Kallik.” He popped down the hatchway at the side of the chamber and vanished from sight.
Rebka went across to Lang and studied the way the harness had been knotted. Less and less, he understood what was going on. With their escape from Quake, everyone except him should have been able to relax; instead, they all seemed to have new agendas of their own. Darya Lang sounded urgent and furious.
He reached out, tugged gently at one point of the harness and hard at another one. The result was gratifying. The bindings released completely to deposit Darya Lang lightly onto the chamber floor. He helped her to her feet and was rewarded with a surprising and embarrassed smile.
“Now why couldn’t I have done that?” She put pressure tentatively on her injured foot, shrugged, and pressed harder. “Last thing I remember, we’d just reached the Umbilical, and Graves and Kallik were fixing me up from the med kits. How long have I been asleep — and when do we reach Opal?”<
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“I don’t know how long you’ve been asleep, but it’s twenty-three hours since Summertide.” Rebka consulted his watch. “Make that closer to twenty-four. And we ought to touch down on Opal in a couple of hours. If we can touch down. They took a real beating there. There’s no rush, though. We have plenty of food and water on board. We can live in this capsule for weeks — even go back up the Umbilical to Midway Station if we have to, and stay there indefinitely.”
“No way.” Darya was shaking her head. “I can’t afford to wait. I’ve only been conscious for a few minutes, but I spent all of them cursing the man who filled me with drugs. We have to get down to the surface of Opal, and you have to get me a ship.”
“To go home? What’s the rush? Does anyone on Sentinel Gate know when you’ll be going back?”
“No one does.” She took Hans Rebka by the arm, leaning on him as they walked over to the capsule’s miniature galley. She sat down, taking her time as she poured herself a hot drink. Finally she turned to him. “But you have it wrong, Hans. I’m not going to Sentinel Gate. I’m going to Gargantua. And I’ll need help to get there.”
“I hope you’re not expecting it from me.” Rebka looked away, very conscious of her fingers on his biceps. “Look, I know that Nenda’s ship was dragged off there, and they were killed. But you don’t want to be killed, too. Gargantua is a gas-giant, a frozen world — we can’t live there; neither can the Cecropians.”
“I didn’t say that the ship and the sphere went right to Gargantua. I don’t think that. I believe the place I need to go is probably one of Gargantua’s moons. But I won’t know that until I get there.”
“Get there and do what? Recover a couple of corpses. Who cares what happens to their bodies? Atvar H’sial left you to die, and she and Nenda abandoned J’merlia and Kallik. Even if they were alive — and you say they’re not — they don’t deserve help.”
“I agree. And that’s not why I have to follow them.” Darya handed Rebka a cup. “Calm down, Hans. Drink that, and listen to me for a minute. I know that people from the Phemus Circle think everyone from the Alliance is a dreamy incompetent, just the way we think you’re all barbarian peasants who don’t bother to wash—”
“Huh!”
“But you and I have been around each other for a while now — long enough to know that those ideas are nonsense. You acknowledge that I’m at least a decent observer. I don’t make things up. So let me tell you what I saw, not what I think. Everyone else here may miss the point of this, but I trust you to draw the right conclusions.
“Remember now — listen first, then think, then react — not the other way round.” She moved closer to Rebka, positioning herself so that it was difficult for him to do anything other than listen to her.
“When we came up out of the clouds on Quake, you were too busy piloting the ship to look behind, and everyone else in the rear compartment was blinded by Mandel and Amaranth. So no one else saw what I saw: Quake opening, deep into the interior. And two objects coming out. One of them flew away, out of the plane of the galaxy. I lost sight of it in less than a second. You saw the other one. It took off toward Gargantua, and Louis Nenda’s ship was carried with it. That was significant, but it isn’t the important point! Everyone said that Quake was far too quiet for so close to Summertide. Sure, I know we thought it was violent, when we were down there. But it wasn’t. Max Perry kept saying it: Where’s all the energy going?
“Well, we know the answer to that now. It was being transformed and stored, so that when the right time came the whole interior of Quake could open up and eject those two bodies — spaceships, if you think they were that.
“I saw it happen, and I caught the sniff of an answer to something that had kept me baffled for months, long before I left Sentinel Gate:
“Why Dobelle?
“Why such a nothing place, I mean, for such an important event?
“The idea of visiting Dobelle occurred to me when I calculated the convergence time and place for influences spreading out from all the artifacts. There was a unique solution: Quake at Summertide. But when I proposed that, the Builder specialists in the Alliance laughed at me. They said, look, Darya, we accept that there is an artifact in the Dobelle system — the Umbilical. But it’s a minor piece of Builder technology. Something we understand; something that isn’t mysterious or big or complex. It makes no sense for the focus of all the Builder activities to be at such a second-class structure, in such a worthless and unimportant part of the Galaxy — I’m sorry, Hans, but I’m quoting, and that’s the way people in the Alliance regard the worlds of the Phemus Circle.”
Rebka shrugged. “Don’t apologize,” he said gruffly. “That’s the way a lot of us think about the Circle worlds, and we live here. Try a weekend on Teufel, sometime — if you can stand it.”
“Well, whatever they said about the Phemus Circle and the Umbilical, they couldn’t argue with the statistical analysis. In fact, they repeated it for themselves and found that everything did point to Dobelle, and to Quake at Summertide. They had to agree with me. The trouble was, I was forced to agree with them. Dobelle made no sense as a place for important action. I mean, I was the one who had written the Catalog description of the Umbilical — ‘one of the simplest and most comprehensible of all Builder artifacts’! People were parroting back my own words.
“So I was baffled when I arrived here. I was still baffled when you flew us up through the clouds, trying to get off Quake in one piece. I couldn’t make sense of Dobelle as the convergence point.
“But then I saw that pulsing light beam shine down from Gargantua and watched the whole of Quake opening up in front of me. And just before I passed out I realized that we had all been missing something obvious.
“All the references on the structure of the galaxy make the same comment, the Dobelle system is ‘one of the natural wonders of the local spiral arm.’ Isn’t it wonderful, the books say, how the interplay of the gravitational fields of Amaranth and Mandel and Gargantua has thrown Dobelle into such a finely balanced orbit — an orbit so placed that once every three hundred and fifty thousand years, all the players line up exactly for Summertide and the Grand Conjunction. Isn’t that just amazing?
“Well, it is amazing — if you believe it. But there’s another way to look at things. The Dobelle system doesn’t just contain an artifact, the Umbilical. The Dobelle system is an artifact! The whole thing.” She grabbed at Rebka’s arm again, caught up in her own vision. “Its whole orbit and geometry were created by the Builders, designed so that once every three hundred and fifty thousand years Mandel and Amaranth and Gargantua are so close to Quake that a special interaction can take place between them. Something inside Quake captures and uses those tidal energies.
“Before I came to Quake, I thought that the Builders themselves might be here — maybe even appear at this particular Summertide. But that’s wrong. The Grand Conjunction serves as a trigger for the departure of those spheres — ships, or whatever they are — from Dobelle. I don’t know where the first one went — out of the galaxy, from the look of it. But we have enough information to track the other one, the one that went toward Gargantua. And if we want to know more about the Builders, that’s where we have to go.
“And soon! Before whatever it is that happens out near Gargantua is over and done with, and we have to wait another three hundred and fifty thousand years for a second chance.”
Finally able to get a word in edgewise, Hans Rebka asked a question of his own. “Are you suggesting that Quake splits open, and something comes out of it at every Grand Conjunction?”
“I certainly am. That’s the purpose of the Grand Conjunction — it provides the timing trigger and the tidal energy needed to open up the interior of Quake. So when Quake opened—”
But it was Rebka’s turn to talk. “Darya, I’m no theorist. But you’re wrong. If you want proof of that, go and talk to Max Perry.”
“He wasn’t watching what happened when we left Quake.”
“Nor was I, particularly. Max and I had other things on our minds. But when I first arrived on Opal, I asked about the history of the doublet. The history of Opal was hard to determine, because it has no permanent land surface. But Perry showed me an analysis of the fossil record of Quake. People had studied it in the early years of colonizing Dobelle, because they needed to know if the surface of Quake was stable enough to live on through Summertide.
“It isn’t, for humans — we proved that pretty well for ourselves. But there has been native life on Quake for hundreds of millions of years, since long before the planet went into its present orbit. And any recent opening of the deep interior of Quake — like the one that you saw — would show clearly as an anomaly in the fossil record.”
He reached out for the display control and set it to show an image of the space above the capsule. Mandel and Amaranth were visible, still huge in the sky, but they were less bright. The knowledge that they were on the wane for another year was comforting. As the stellar partners dimmed, Gargantua shone brighter in the sky over to their right. But the giant planet was well past its own periastron, and the orange-brown disk was already smaller. No blinding beam of light shone forth from Gargantua, or from one of its satellites. Quake hung above the capsule, its surface dark and peaceful.
“You see, Darya, there’s no evidence in the whole fossil record of a deep disturbance of Quake, comparable with what you saw. Not three years ago, or three hundred, or three hundred and fifty thousand. The deep interior of Quake has been hidden from view, as far back as people can trace the history of its surface. And that’s at least five million years.”
He expected Darya to be crushed by his comments. She came back stronger than ever. “So this Grand Conjunction was special. That makes it more important to find out why. Hans, let me give you the bottom line. You can go back to your work on the Phemus Circle tomorrow. But I can’t go back to Sentinel Gate. Not yet. I have to go on and take a look at Gargantua. I didn’t spend my whole adult life studying the Builders and then come all this way just to stop when the trail gets hot. Maybe the Builders aren’t out near Gargantua—”
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