Divergence hu-1

by Charles Sheffield

  Culture: Human culture is built around four basic elements: sexual relationships, territorial rights, individual intellectual dominance, and desire for group acceptance. The H’sirin model using just these four traits as independent variables enables accurate prediction of human behavior patterns. On the basis of this, human culture is judged to be of Level Two, with few prospects for advancement to a higher level.

  — From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients).

  CHAPTER 2

  Life is just one damned thing after another.

  To Birdie Kelly, squelching through the juicy dark mud of the Sling with a food tray balanced in front of him and a message flimsy stuck between the grimy fingers of his right hand, that thought came with the force and freshness of revelation.

  One damned thing after another! he repeated to himself. No sooner was his boss, Max Perry, shipped off to the hospital for a couple of weeks of rehab surgery than Birdie found himself nursemaiding an Alliance councilor, no less, from far-off Miranda. Perry had been hard to take, with his obsessive need to work and his fixation about visits to Quake, but Julius Graves was no easier. Worse, in some ways, sitting there talking to himself when he should have been on his way back to Miranda weeks before. There he remained, day after day, loafing about indoors and not lifting a finger to help with the reconstruction work, and all the while ignoring recall messages from his own superiors. He seemed ready to stay forever.

  Even so…

  Birdie paused at the entrance to the building and took a deep breath of damp sea air.

  Even so, it was impossible to feel anything other than elated these days. Birdie stared up at the dappled blue sky with Mandel’s golden disk showing through broken cloud, then around him at the torn vegetation pushing out new shoots from broken stems. A light breeze roamed in from the west, signaling a perfect day for sailing. He loved it all, and it all seemed too good to be true. Summertide was over, the surface of Opal was returning to its usual tranquility, and Birdie had survived. That was more than could be said for half the unfortunate population of the waterworld.

  It was more than he had expected for himself. One week earlier, as Summertide reached its climax and the gravity fields of Mandel and Amaranth tore at Opal, Birdie had huddled alone in the prow of a small boat and watched the turbulent surface ahead of him veer from horizontal to near-vertical.

  He was a goner and he knew it. Radio signals had warned that the monster was on the way. Tidal forces had created a great soliton, a solitary wave over a kilometer high that was sweeping around the whole girth of Opal. Sling after Sling had sent their last messages, reporting on wave speed and height before the huge but fragile rafts of mud and tangled vegetation were torn apart and fell silent.

  There was no way to avoid it. Birdie had crouched in the bottom of the boat, clutching the bottom boards with white-knuckled hands.

  The boat’s prow tilted up. Thirty degrees, forty-five, sixty. Horizontal and vertical switched roles. Birdie found himself with his feet braced on the boat’s stern, his hands holding tight to the centerboard and the little mast. He was lifted, with a two- or three-gee force on his body that went on and on, like a launch from Starside Port to orbit. Rushing water flew past, spray two feet from his nose. For half a minute he was carried up and up, a flyspeck on a wall of ocean, up into Opal’s dark clouds. He poised there, forever, unable to see anything as the boat leveled off. At last came the fall, leaving his stomach behind on the downward plunge.

  He had been permitted one breathtaking view as they dropped out of the clouds: Opal’s seabed lay ahead, exposed by millennial tides, dotted with long-sunken ships and the vast green bodies of stranded Dowsers, unbuoyed by water and crushed by their own multimillion-ton weight. Then he was swooping down a long, foam-flecked slope, toward that muddy wasteland. He knew, even more certainly than before, that he was about to die.

  A second, smaller wave, running crosswise to the first, saved him. Before he could be smashed onto the unforgiving seabed, there was a scream of wind and a harsh slap on the boat’s rugged stern. He found himself being lifted again in a boiling torrent of warm spray, holding harder than ever, almost unable to breathe. But breathe he did, and held on, too, an hour longer than he would have believed humanly possible, until Summertide was past and the tough little boat had been tossed to calmer waters.

  It was something to tell his grandchildren about — if he ever got around to having any.

  He had not intended to, but now he might. Only weeks after Summertide, and the social pressure was already on. Every fertile woman would be pregnant within the next month, pushing Opal’s population back toward survival level.

  Birdie looked up at the calm blue sky and drew in another long, reassuring breath. Perhaps the real miracle was not that he had lived to tell the tale, but that his story seemed to have been repeated again and again across the entire surface of Opal. Some of the Slings, caught in contrary crosscurrents, had been held together by watery whirlpools when all logic suggested they should have been torn apart. Survivors told of flotsam that had come within reach just as their own strength was failing.

  Or maybe they had it backward. Birdie had a new insight. Maybe they had hung on, like him, for exactly as long as was necessary until a means of self-preservation came to hand. People who lived in the Dobelle system did not give in easily. They could not afford to.

  Birdie pushed the wicker door of the one-story building open with his knee, wiped his muddy shoes on the rush mat in the entrance, and walked through to the inside room.

  “Same thing again, I’m afraid: boiled Dowser, grilled Dowser, and fried Dowser, with a bit of Dowser on the side.” He placed the tray on a table of plaited reeds. “We’ll be eating this stuff for a while, until we can get the fishing boats back into service.” He removed the lid of the big dish, leaned forward, and sniffed. His nose wrinkled. “Unless it gets too rotten to eat. Not far to go, if you ask me. Come on, though, dig in. It tastes even worse cold.”

  The man sitting in the chair beyond the table was tall and bony, with a bald and bulging head burned purple-red by hard radiation. His eyes, a faded and misty blue beneath bushy eyebrows, gazed thoughtfully up at Birdie and right through him.

  Birdie wriggled. He had not really expected his cheerful comments to elicit a matching reaction from Julius Graves — they never had in the past — but there was no reason for the other man to look so mournful. After all, only a week earlier Graves had survived an experience over on Opal’s sister planet, Quake, that by the sound of it had been as harrowing as anything that Birdie had been through. The councilor ought to be filled with the same zest for life, the same satisfaction at being alive.

  “Steven and I have been talking again,” Graves said. “He has me almost persuaded.”

  Birdie laid down the message flimsy and helped himself to food. “Oh, yes? What’s he been saying, then?”

  Steven Graves was another thing that Birdie found hard to take. An interior mnemonic twin was no big deal; it was something employed by a number of other Council members, an added pair of cerebral hemispheres grown and housed within the human skull and coupled to the original brain hemispheres via a new corpus callosum. All it did was provide an extended and convenient organic memory, slower but less bulky than an inorganic mnemonic unit. What it was not supposed to do — what it had never done before, to Birdie Kelly’s knowledge — was to develop self-awareness. But Julius Graves’s mnemonic twin, Steven Graves, not only possessed independent consciousness; on occasion he seemed to take over. Birdie preferred him in many ways. Steven’s personality was far more cheerful and jokey. But it was disconcerting not to know who you were talking to at any given time, and although Julius seemed to be in charge at the moment, in another second it might be Steven.

  “For almost a week I have been summoning my energy to return to Miranda,” Graves said, “to report on my experiences here.”

  And the sooner the better, matey, Birdie thought. But instead of speaki
ng, he picked up the message flimsy that he had put down on the table, brushing off the dirt and dried black mud that had somehow found their way onto it.

  “I had been oddly reluctant to do so,” Graves went on, “and I suspect that my instincts knew something denied to my forebrain. But now I think Steven has put his finger — metaphorically speaking — on the reason. It concerns the Awakening, and the ones who went off to Gargantua.”

  Birdie held out the grimy message. “Speaking of Miranda, this came in about an hour ago. I didn’t read it,” he said, in an unconvincing afterthought.

  Graves scanned the sheet, held it out between finger and thumb, and allowed it to flutter to the floor.

  “According to reports I have had since Summertide,” he continued, “the awakening of the artifacts ended with that event. For years, Builder artifacts across the spiral arm had been showing signs of increased activity. But now all that stirring has come to an end, and the spiral arm is quiet again. Why? We do not know, but as Steven points out, Darya Lang insisted that the events of this Summertide have an influence beyond this planet, or even this stellar system. The Grand Conjunction of stellar and planetary positions here takes place only once every three hundred and fifty thousand years. Lang did not want humanity to be forced to wait that long for another awakening, and I agreed with her. When she and Hans Rebka decided to follow the sphere that emerged at Summertide from the interior of Quake, I did not oppose it. When J’merlia and Kallik requested permission to go to Gargantua also, to learn whether their former masters were living or dead, I encouraged them and took their side, although I felt in my heart that this was scarcely my business. My task was to return to Miranda and report on the case that brought me here in the first place. But—

  “That’s what the message is all about.” Birdie dropped the pretense of ignorance. “They want to know why you’re still here. They ask when you’ll be leaving. You could be in a lot of trouble if you don’t reply.”

  Julius Graves ignored him. “But what could be assigned to me on Miranda half as important as what may be happening out near Gargantua? To quote Steven again, if we return to Miranda we will surely be assigned to another case of interspecies conflict and ethical dilemma. But if the Builders are waiting out at Gargantua, as Darya Lang insists they must be, then the greatest interspecies meeting in the history of the spiral arm is waiting with them. The ethical issues could be vast and unprecedented, and all these events may be triggered by the arrival of Darya Lang, Hans Rebka, and the two slaves — unless they have already been precipitated by the earlier arrival of Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda. In either case, my own future action is at last clear. I must requisition a starship and follow the others to Gargantua. I do not say this immodestly, but their interactions could be disastrous without the mediating influence of a Council member. I therefore ask your assistance in finding me such a starship, and in outfitting it suitably for the journey to Gargantua…”

  Graves was maundering on, but Birdie was hardly listening. At last, they were going to be rid of a useless drone — for that’s what Julius Graves was proving to be, even if he did happen to be a Council member. If he wanted a ship, Birdie could not stop him, though Lord knows where they would find one, with everything in such a mess. Birdie would have to do it somehow, because a councilor could commandeer any local resources that he or she deemed necessary. Anyway, the temporary loss of a ship was a small price to pay to get rid of the distracting and the time-wasting influence of Julius and Steven Graves.

  “… Mr. Kelly, as soon as possible.”

  The mention of Birdie’s own last name jerked his attention back to the other man. “Yes, Councilor? I’m sorry, I missed that.”

  “I was saying, Mr. Kelly, that I appreciate this to be a time of considerable stress for everyone on Opal. With Starside Port out of action, finding a working spaceship may call for considerable improvisation. At the same time, I hope that you and I can be on our way to Gargantua fairly soon — shall we say, in one standard week?”

  “Me?” Birdie had not been listening right; he must have missed a key part of what Graves had been saying. “Did you say me? You didn’t say me, did you?”

  “Certainly. I know that Gargantua and its satellites are already fifty million kilometers away and getting farther every minute, but they still form part of the Mandel system. I discussed the matter with Commander Perry, and although his own duties on Opal prevent him from traveling, he believes a presence from this planet’s government is important. He is issuing orders for you to accompany me on his behalf to Gargantua.”

  Gargantua.

  Week-dead Dowser did not taste great at the best of times. Birdie pushed the plate away from him and tried to hold on to what he had already eaten. He stood up. He must have said something to Julius Graves before he found himself once more walking outside the building, but under torture he could not have recalled what it was.

  Gargantua! Birdie peered upward, into Opal’s blue sky. Mandel was rapidly sinking toward sunset, as Opal and Quake performed their dizzying eight-hour whirl about each other. Somewhere out there, beyond the pleasant blue sky, out where Mandel was diminished to a squinty little point of light, there rolled the gas-giant planet surrounded by its frosty retinue of satellites. They were stark, frozen, lifeless, and dark. Even the best-prepared expeditions to Gargantua, led by the Dobelle system’s most experienced space travelers, had suffered considerable casualties. The outer system was simply too remote, too cold, too inhospitable to human life. Compared with that, Opal during a Level Five storm felt safe and welcoming.

  Birdie stared around him. He knew it all, from the sticky familiarity of warm black mud underfoot and the thicketed tangle of vines that began just a few meters from the building, to the heavy backs of the huge, lumbering tortoises, making their unhurried way inland through the undergrowth after surviving Summertide at sea. Birdie recognized them all; and he loved them all.

  Earlier in the day this whole pleasant prospect had seemed too good to be true. He had just learned that it was.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Summer Dreamboat had started life as a plaything, a teenager’s runabout intended for within-system planetary hops. Everything aboard the ship had been designed with that in mind, from the compact galley, sanitation, and disposal facilities, to the single pair of narrow berths. The addition of a full-fledged Bose Drive had provided the Dreamboat with a far-ranging interstellar capability, while whittling the internal space down even further.

  Its occupants — or at least the human ones — were cursing that addition now as wasted space. The passage from Dobelle to Gargantua had to be done using the cold-catalyzed fusion drive, which could make no use at all of the Bose interstellar network.

  During the second day of the journey Darya Lang and Hans Rebka had retreated to the berths, where they lay side by side.

  “Too many legs,” Rebka said softly.

  Darya Lang nodded. She did not say it, but they both knew the cramped quarters were harder on her. He had grown up on Teufel, one of the poorest and most backward worlds of the Phemus Circle. Hardship and discomfort were to him so natural and so familiar that he did not even recognize their presence. She had been spoiled — though she had never known it, until the past couple of months — by the luxury and abundance of Sentinel Gate, one of the spiral arm’s garden planets.

  “For me, too many legs,” she repeated. “Sixteen too many. And too many eyes for you.”

  He understood at once and touched her arm apologetically. The Lo’tfian, J’merlia, seemed mostly legs and eyes. Eight black articulated limbs were attached to the long, pipestem torso, and J’merlia’s narrow head was dominated by the big, lemon-colored compound eyes on short eyestalks. Kallik was just as well-endowed. The Hymenopt’s body was short, stubby, and black-furred, but eight wiry legs sprang from the rotund torso, and the small, smooth head was entirely surrounded by multiple pairs of bright, black eyes. Kallik and J’merlia did not mean to get in the way, but when the
y were both awake and active it was impossible to move around the ship’s little cabin without tripping over the odd outstretched appendage.

  Darya Lang and Hans Rebka had retreated to the berths as the only place left. But even there they found little privacy — or too little, Darya thought, for Hans Rebka.

  The two months since she had left her quiet life as a research scientist on Sentinel Gate had been full of surprises; not least of them was the discovery that many “facts” about life on the backward and impoverished worlds of the Perimeter were just not so. Everyone on Shasta knew that the urge to reproduce dominated everything on the underpopulated planets of the Phemus Circle, where both men and women were obsessed with sex. The rich worlds of the Fourth Alliance “knew” that people on Teufel and Scaldworld and Quake and Opal did it whenever and wherever they could.

  Perhaps so, in principle; there was a curious primness in border planet society when it came to practice. Men and women might show immediate interest in each other, from bold eye contact to open invitation. But let the time arrive for doing something, in public or even in private, and Darya suspected they were oddly puritanical.

  She had obtained positive and annoying proof of that idea when the Summer Dreamboat embarked on the long journey to Gargantua. On the first night the two aliens had stretched out on the floor, leaving the berths to Darya and Hans. She lay in her bunk and waited. When nothing happened, she took the initiative.

  He rebuffed her, though in an oddly indirect way. “Of course I’d like to — but what about your foot?” he whispered. “You’ll hurt it too much. I mean — we can’t. Your foot…”