Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  "He is. An' I don't see why, he looks just fine." Nenda grabbed hold of the Chism Polypheme, who appeared to be trying to form himself into a seamless blubbering sphere of dark green. "Hold still, you great streak of green funk. There's not a thing wrong with you."

  "Agony," Dulcimer whimpered. "Oh, the sheer agony."

  "Where do you say you're hurtin'?"

  Five little arms waved in unison, pointing down toward Dulcimer's tail. Nenda followed the direction, probing down with his hands into the tight-coiled spiral.

  "Nothing here," he muttered. And then he gave a sudden hoot of triumph. "Hold it. You're right, an' I'm wrong. Jackpot! Dulcimer, you're a marvel, bein' smart enough to grab this with your rear end. Relax, now, I've got to pull it off you."

  "No! It's in my flesh." Dulcimer gave a whistling scream. "My own flesh. Don't do that."

  "Already did. All over." Louis Nenda was bending low at the Polypheme's tail and chuckling with satisfaction. "Think of it this way, Dulcimer. You got a contract with us that gives you twelve percent of this. An' not only that, I think mebbe there's others will give you their share of it, too."

  While Darya stared at him in total confusion, Louis Nenda slowly straightened up. He raised his right hand.

  "Look-see. They're not gonna be able to say we made the whole thing up this time."

  And finally the others could see it. Held firmly between Nenda's finger and thumb, wriggling furiously and trying to take a bite out of him with its tiny razor-sharp beak, was a pale apricot form: the unmistakable shape of an angry infant Zardalu.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  If Hans Rebka had been asked—without giving him time to think about it—how long it was from leaving the Erebus to his return with Darya Lang and the rest, he might have guessed at fifteen to twenty hours. Certainly more than twelve. It was a shock to glance at the ship's log on the Indulgence as they docked, and learn that less than three hours had passed since they had floated free of the main ship.

  Nothing on board the Erebus seemed to have changed. The ship was drifting along in the same high orbit, silent and apparently lifeless. No one greeted them as they emerged from the hold.

  Rebka led the way to the bridge. Everyone followed him, not because they were needed there but because they were too drained to think of doing anything else. Dulcimer was the sole exception. The Polypheme went toward the nearest reactor with a single-minded fixity of intention that made him oblivious to everything else.

  "Ah, let him have it," Nenda muttered, seeing Darya's questioning face. "Look at the color of him. He'll be good for nothin' anyway, till he gets a jolt of sun-juice. An' close that damned reactor door behind you," he called out to Dulcimer as they went past him.

  The two of them had been walking last in the group, Darya drinking from every spigot until she felt like a rolling ball of water. They were both exhausted, drifting along and talking about nothing. Or rather, she was exhausted and Nenda was talking about something, but Darya was too tired to fathom what. He seemed to be trying to lead up to a definite statement, but then always he backed away from it. Finally she patted his arm and said, "Not just now, Louis. I'm too wiped out for hard thinking."

  He grunted his disagreement. "We gotta talk now, Darya. This may be our only chance."

  "Of course it won't be. We'll talk later."

  "Can't do it later. Has to be now. Know what the Cecropians say? 'Delay is the deadliest form of denial.' "

  "Never heard of that saying before." Darya yawned. "Why don't you just wait and tell me about it tomorrow?" She moved on, vaguely aware that he did not seem pleased with her answer.

  Nenda followed, the infant Zardalu tucked under one arm. It was peering around with bright, inquisitive eyes and trying to turn far enough to bite his chest. He sighed, gave the Zardalu a reproving swipe on the head, and increased his pace until he was again side by side with Darya. He put his free arm around her and hugged her shoulders, but he did not speak again on the way to the control room of the Erebus.

  Hans Rebka had been there for a couple of minutes, staring into one of the alcoves of the huge room. His shoulders were bowed with fatigue—but he straightened up quickly enough when he saw Nenda's arm around Darya.

  She knew that expression. To avoid an argument she pulled free and hurried across to the alcove herself—and received the biggest shock of all. Atvar H'sial was there, sitting crouched by J'merlia's limp and silent body.

  J'merlia. Darya had seen him vanish, down on Genizee. He could not be here, lying on the floor of the control room.

  "J'merlia . . ." she began, and then subsided. Her head was full of cotton. She didn't know where to begin.

  "At says J'merlia's doin' all right," Nenda said. He had followed her over to the alcove. "She's in communication with him. She says he's not quite conscious yet, but his condition's improving. We just hafta be patient and wait a minute."

  J'merlia was beginning to groan and mutter. Darya leaned closer. It was a language that she could not understand. She looked around the group. "Anyone recognize that?"

  "Recognize, yes," E.C. Tally said. "Understand, no. That is J'merlia's native tongue; the language of an adult male Lo'tfian. Unfortunately there is no dictionary in the central data bank. I suspect that no one in this party speaks it."

  "But that don't matter," Nenda added. "There's some sorta trauma in J'merlia for human speech, but everything'll come out anyway in the pheromones. Atvar H'sial can tell me what J'merlia's tryin' to say, and I can tell you. She says it might be a couple of minutes more before we get sense, but she wants us to be ready for it. Kallik, gimme a computer recording mode."

  The Hymenopt nodded, and her paws flew across the console. She had apparently recovered from her earlier meeting with the vanishing J'merlia. Now she was perched on the rail of the console, staring intently down at the Lo'tfian and at Atvar H'sial hovering worriedly over him.

  Darya noticed that Kallik was using her middle paws. One forelimb was missing. What had happened to it? No one bothered to mention it. Her eyes went on to Louis Nenda; his arms were covered with blister burns from contact with some hot or corrosive liquid. Those two were the worst off physically, but no one else was much better. Every face and body was lined with fatigue and covered with grime.

  Darya must look as bad herself. And her inside was worse than her outside. She felt a thousand years old.

  The ridiculous nature of the whole effort struck her. To take this motley, wounded, and exhausted bunch of cripples, slaves, and misfits, and expect them to make progress in understanding anything, let alone the mysteries of Genizee and its shrouded belt of singularities . . .

  That was some joke. Except that she could not laugh at it. She could not even feel angry anymore. And she had not faced up to the biggest mystery of all: J'merlia's very presence.

  "How can he be here?" Darya found herself blurting out her questions and pointing at the Lo'tfian. "He was on Genizee with me and Tally. And then he vanished—into the air."

  They did not mock her statement, which would have been perfectly justified. "J'merlia was on the Erebus with Julian Graves, too," Hans Rebka said, a sigh in his voice. "He vanished here. He was with our party on Genizee. And he vanished there. And then a few hours ago he came back in the seedship—unconscious. Don't ask me, Darya. You're the one who's good at theories. What's your explanation?"

  Optical illusion. Mirrors. Magic. Darya's thoughts were running out of control. "I don't have one. It's impossible."

  "So wait another second, an' mebbe we'll hear J'merlia speak for himself." Louis Nenda pointed to Atvar H'sial. The Cecropian's pleated proboscis was trembling its way across J'merlia's body, touching his pale-lemon eyes on their short stalks, caressing the sensing antennas and the narrow head. J'merlia was jerking and mumbling in response to her touch. Darya and the other humans heard nothing intelligible, but suddenly Louis Nenda began to talk.

  "Goin' to give it verbatim if I can." He placed the infant Zardalu on one of the cont
rol chairs, where it clamped itself firmly with multiple suckers and bit an experimental beakful of soft seat cushion. "At'll ask the questions, say what J'merlia says exact to me, I pass it on exact to you. Get ready, Kallik. Any second now."

  The smell of complex pheromones was strong in the air of the cabin, their message tantalizingly hidden from most of the watchers.

  "I, J'merlia, hear, and I reply," Nenda said, in a flat, unnatural voice. "It began with the seedship. I was left alone to repair that ship, whilst Dominatrix Atvar H'sial, Captain Rebka, and Master Nenda went to explore the shore buildings of the Zardalu. I completed the repair ahead of schedule and decided to test the seedship in flight. It performed perfectly. I therefore flew it back to the buildings, where I found that large numbers of Zardalu were emerging from the water . . ."

  The room was totally silent except for J'merlia's harsh breathing and Nenda's gruff, emotionless voice. He might have been reading from a parts list when he spoke of the escape to space after the Zardalu had forced the others underground, of J'merlia's unplanned rendezvous with the amorphous singularity, of the agonies of physical distortion on the edge of that singularity, of the improbable rescue and transfer to Hollow-World. The description of J'merlia's awakening, and the meeting with Guardian, produced an irrepressible stir of interest and muttered comments.

  "Sounds exactly like World-Keeper," Rebka said softly. "Nenda, can you ask Atvar H'sial to probe for a fuller physical description of that Builder construct?"

  "I can ask her to try. I don't think she got good two-way talk yet, though."

  The recital continued: of Guardian's message-probe survey of the spiral arm; of Guardian's increasing conviction of its own unique role as preserver and protector of Genizee for the return of the Builders. And finally—Atvar H'sial's proboscis writhed, and Louis Nenda's voice cracked as he spoke—J'merlia's own pain began. He had been split, his mind shattered to fragments, his body sent far away on multiple assignments.

  He had been nowhere and everywhere, simultaneously; with Guardian on Hollow-World, with Julian Graves on the Erebus, and with both parties on and under the surface of Genizee. He had died in the roaring column of plasma, he had vanished from the grasp of the Zardalu, he had been cross-examined by Guardian, and later he in turn had asked his programmed questions of World-Keeper. And at the end, the worst agony: J'merlia's loss of selves and final collapse.

  The Lo'tfian had been lying cradled in four of Atvar H'sial's limbs. As Nenda said the word "collapse" he sat up and stared around him. The pale-yellow eyes were puzzled, but they were rational.

  "Collapse," he repeated in human speech. His tone was perplexed. "When that collapse was over, Guardian told me that my task was now complete. I was again on Hollow-World, but I was told that I must leave there. And now I am again on the Erebus. How did I come here?"

  Darya glanced at each of the others in turn. They all seemed calm, even relaxed. Yet J'merlia's "explanation" of how he had been in many places at once, and vanished instantaneously from each of them explained nothing.

  Why weren't the rest as upset and confused as she was? Was she unique in the way that things contrary to physical laws disturbed her? All her life she had sought rationality and shunned mysticism or magic. But now, faced with flagrant violation of what she believed possible . . . could she be seeing evidence of a whole new physics, radically different from everything that she had ever learned?

  Darya rubbed her eyes. She could accept many things, but not that. But wasn't failure to accept itself unacceptable? Didn't she pride herself on her open-mindedness, her willingness to theorize based on evidence rather than prejudice?

  Exhausted, Darya withdrew into her own unhappy trance of analysis and reassessment.

  When J'merlia began to talk for himself, Louis Nenda ended his translation. With the attention of the group all on the Lo'tfian, he sidled across to Atvar H'sial and whispered a pheromonal question at a level that only the Cecropian could receive: "How is J'merlia? In the head, I mean. Can you tell?"

  Atvar H'sial edged away from the group, leading Nenda with her. "He is mystifyingly normal," she said softly. "Almost everything he has told us sounds impossible, yet there is no evidence that he is lying, or fabricating his own version of events."

  "So he'll be able to talk for himself from now on? And answer questions when they have them?"

  "I believe so."

  "Then this is the best time, right now. The Indulgence is fueled and deserted. You made a flight plan for us to clear the Anfract. We could take off while everybody's sitting listenin' with their mouths open, and head back to Glister." He paused, a question mark in his pheromones. "If you still want to do it, I mean."

  "I am not sure." Atvar H'sial was also oddly hesitant. "Perhaps such action is premature." The twin yellow horns in the middle of her head turned to the group clustered around J'merlia, then back to Nenda. "He seems normal, but that only means any derangement must be deep. It is a poor time to leave him."

  "Are you tellin' me you wanna stick around awhile, to make sure your bug's all right? Because if you are, I guess I don't mind doing—"

  "I did not say that. I realize that we made a deal before you left for Genizee. Cecropians do not renege on their commitments. But I am J'merlia's dominatrix, and have been since he was first postlarval. So if you wish to remain longer . . ."

  "I agreed to that deal, too. If you want to change, it, I'll be glad to. Just don't start tellin' me what you'll be leavin' behind if we go. I'm leavin' behind a helluva lot more." Nenda watched as Atvar H'sial's trumpet horns turned to focus on Darya Lang. "Don't get me wrong. What I mean is, I'm at least as close to Kallik as you are to J'merlia, and I'll be leavin' her behind." He sighed. "But a deal's a deal."

  Atvar H'sial scanned Nenda, J'merlia, and Darya Lang for a long time before she nodded. "We will all suffer, but we cannot take them. And if we do not leave now, who knows when our chance will come? The separation with J'merlia and Kallik—or with anyone else—will surely be as brief as we can make it. But even so, if we are going, then I would prefer to go—at once."

  Nenda nodded. The Cecropian and the Karelian human backed quietly away toward the exit of the control chamber. At the door they paused for a few seconds and stared back into the room. Finally, at some mutual decision point, they turned and hustled each other out of the chamber.

  Their departure went unnoticed. Darya was still deep in her own brooding, and everybody else was focused on J'merlia.

  "There are many sentient Builder constructs in the spiral arm," the Lo'tfian was saying. "Hundreds or thousands of them, according to Guardian, set in well-hidden locations where we have never dreamed of looking. They have intermittent contact with each other, as they have for millions of years. But Guardian and World-Keeper question the actions and even the sanity of most of the others. They are united in their view that this region, and this alone, will be the home of the Builders when they return to the spiral arm."

  Darya had been fascinated by the Builders and their artifacts for all of her adult life, but at the moment other matters had higher priority.

  "J'merlia!" she found a final pocket of energy and tried one last time. "You say you were here, at the same time as you were on Genizee. But that can't be right. Nothing can be in two places at once. How do you explain what happened to you?"

  The pale-yellow eyes swiveled. J'merlia shook his head. "Explain? I cannot explain. I know only that it is so."

  "And I know that it's impossible."

  "It cannot be impossible. Because it happened."

  It was the ultimate irrefutable argument. J'merlia was calm and immovable. Darya stared at him in frustration. The rest of the group looked on in silence, until E.C. Tally stirred and turned to Darya.

  "May I speak?"

  "Not unless it's relevant," Darya snapped. She was so tired, so baffled—the last thing she could stand at the moment was some senseless digression from a witless embodied computer.

  "It is, I believe, mo
st relevant. May I speak?"

  "Oh, get on with it."

  "To a logical entity, such as myself, the behavior of organic intelligences, such as yourself, provides many anomalies. For example, the history of humanity, the species concerning which my data banks have most information, is replete with cases where humans, on little or no evidence, have believed in impossibilities. They have accepted the existence of a variety of improbable entities: of gods and demons, of fairies and elves, of 'good luck' charms, of magic potions, of curses and hexes and evil eyes."

  "Tally, if you're going blather about—"

  "But at the same time, humans and other organic intelligences often seem unwilling to accept the implications and consequences of their own legitimate scientific theories." Tally stared squarely at Darya. "For example, do you reject the basic concepts of quantum theory?"

  "Of course I don't!"