Darya’s foot had been burned during the retreat from Quake at Summertide. It was healing fast. She resisted the urge to say, “Damn my foot. Why don’t you just let me be the judge of what hurts too much?”
Instead she withdrew, convinced that Hans came from one of those curious societies where women were not supposed to take the lead in sexual matters. She waited. And waited. Finally, during the next sleep period, she asked what was wrong. Wasn’t he interested? Didn’t he find her attractive?
“Of course I do.” He kept his voice low and glanced across toward the two aliens. As far as Darya could tell they were both sound asleep, in an untidy sprawl of intermeshed limbs. “But what about them?”
“What about ’em? I hope you’re not suggesting they should join in.”
“Don’t be disgusting. But if they wake up, they’ll see us.”
So that was it. A privacy taboo, just like the one on Moldave. And apparently a strong one. Hans would not be able to do anything as long as they were cooped up in the ship with J’merlia and Kallik, even though the aliens could have nothing beyond a possible academic interest in human mating procedures.
But their indifference did not change the situation for Hans Rebka. Darya had given up.
“Too many eyes for you,” she repeated. “I know. Don’t worry about it, Hans. So how much longer before we reach Gargantua?”
“About forty hours.” He was relieved to change the subject. “I can’t stop wondering — what do you think we are going to find there?”
He looked at Darya expectantly. She had no answer, though she admitted the justice of his question. After all, she was the one who had actually seen the dark sphere gobble up Louis Nenda’s ship and head off to Gargantua. Hans had been too busy trying to stop Nenda from shooting them out of the sky. But did she really expect to find the Builders there, now that she’d had plenty of time to think about it?
For Darya, that was the ultimate question. The Builders had disappeared from the spiral arm more than five million years earlier, but she had been pursuing them in one way or another for all of her adult life. It had begun with a single Builder artifact, the Sentinel, visible from her birthworld of Sentinel Gate. Darya had first seen it as an infant. She had grown up with that shining and striated sphere glowing in her night sky. Inaccessible to humans and to all human constructs, the unreachable interior of Sentinel had come to symbolize for her the whole mystery of the lost Builders. Her conviction that Summertide was somehow connected with Builder artifacts had brought her to Dobelle, and the events at Summertide had provided a new insight: the alignment of planetary and stellar positions that caused Summertide was itself an artifact, the whole stellar system a construct of the long-vanished master engineers.
But Hans Rebka’s question still demanded an answer. Had she become so obsessed with the Builders, and everything to do with them, that she saw Builder influence everywhere? It was not uncommon for a scientist to live with a theory for so long that it took control. Data and observations were forced to fit the theory, rather than being used to test it and if necessary reject it. How did she know she was not guilty of that same failing?
“I know what I saw, Hans. But beyond the evidence of my eyes — however you weight that — all I can offer are my own deductions, however you weight them. Can you pick up an image of Gargantua with the external sensors?”
“Should be able to.” He craned his head around. “And we ought to be able to look at it right here — we’re line-of-sight for the projectors. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a minute.”
It did not take that long. Twenty seconds at the display controls of the Summer Dreamboat gave Hans Rebka a three-dimensional image in the space above the twin berths. He carried the remote control unit over to Darya, letting her use it to pinpoint the target and zoom as she chose.
The planet sat in the center of the globe of view. And what a change since the last time that Darya had seen it. Then the light of Gargantua had been screened by the protective filters of the Dreamboat’s viewing port. The planet had been gigantic, sure enough, bulking across half the field of view, but it had also been faint, faded to a spectral shade by the brilliant torrents of light sleeting in from Mandel and Amaranth. Now Gargantua was a sphere not much bigger than Darya’s thumbnail, but it glowed like a jewel, rich oranges and ochers of high-quality zircon and hessonite against a black background scattered with faint stars. There was just a hint of banding to mark the axis of the planet’s rotation, and the four bright points of light in suspiciously accurate alignment with the equator had to be Gargantua’s major satellites. Darya knew that a thousand other sizable fragments of debris orbited closer to the planet, but from this distance they were invisible. Their paths must have become a monstrous jumble after the perturbations of periastron passage close to Mandel and Amaranth.
Not the harmony of the spheres, but a rough charivari of tangled orbits. Navigation through them would be a problem.
She studied the image, then used the remote marker to indicate a point a quarter of a radius away from the planetary terminator.
“When the ray of light first appeared, it came from just about there.” She closed her eyes for a moment, recalling what she had seen. “But it wasn’t ordinary light, or it would have been invisible in empty space. I could see it all the way, and I could follow its line right back to that point.”
“But couldn’t it have come from a lot farther away — way out past Gargantua?”
“No. Because by the time the silver sphere turned into a hole in space, swallowed up Louis Nenda’s ship, and zoomed off along the light-line, the ray’s point of origin had moved. It was right next to Gargantua by the time I lost sight of it. The only way you can explain that is if it came from something in orbit around Gargantua.”
Darya closed her eyes again. She had a bit of a headache, and recalling the last desperate minutes close to Summertide had somehow made her dizzy and disoriented. Her eyes did not want to focus. She must have been staring for too long at the image on the display. She squinted up at Gargantua. The giant planet was receding fast from Mandel, on a complex orbit controlled both by Mandel and its dwarf stellar companion. But the Dreamboat was moving faster yet. It was catching up.
“A few more hours, Hans.” She suddenly felt slow and lazy. “Just a few more hours. We’ll start to see all the little satellites. Begin to have an idea where we’re going. Won’t we?” She was puzzled by her own words, and by the odd sound of her own voice. “Where are we going? I don’t know where we’re going.”
He did not answer. She made a big effort and turned to him, to find that he was not looking at her at all. He was staring at J’merlia and Kallik.
“Still asleep,” he said.
“Yeah. Still asleep.” Darya smiled. “ ’S all right, Hans, I’m not going to attack you.”
But he was sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bunk. His face was redder than usual, and the line of the scar that ran from his left temple to the point of his jaw showed clearly.
“Something’s wrong. Kallik never sleeps for more than half an hour at a time. Stay there.”
She watched as he hurried over to the central control panel of the Dreamboat, studied it, and swore aloud. He reached forward. There was a whir of atmospheric conditioners, and Darya felt a cold and sudden draft in her face. She muttered a protest. He ignored her. He was bending over the inert forms of J’merlia and Kallik; then, suddenly, he appeared at her side again.
“How are you feeling? Come on, sit up,”
Darya found herself being levered to an upright sitting position. The chilly air brought her to fuller wakefulness, and she shivered. “I’m all right. What’s wrong?”
“Atmosphere. The ship took a real beating when we lifted off from Quake. Something was knocked out of whack in the air plant. I’ve put in a temporary override, and we’ll do manual control till we know what happened.”
For the first time, his urgency reached through to her.
“Are we all right? And Kallik and J’merlia?”
“Now we are, all of us. We’re quite safe. But we weren’t. Maybe J’merlia and Kallik could have breathed what we were getting a few minutes ago — they have a high tolerance for bad air — but you and I couldn’t. Too much monoxide. Another half hour like that, we’d have been dead.”
Dead! Darya felt a cold wave across her body, nothing to do with the chilly cabin breeze. When they had faced death at Summertide, the dangers had been obvious to all of them. But Death could arrive in other ways, never making an appointment or announcing his presence, creeping in to take a person when she was least expecting him…
She could not relax. Hans Rebka had stretched out on the bunk again by Darya’s side. She moved close to him, needing human contact. He was breathing hard, and a moment later they were touching along most of their bodies. She could feel him trembling. But then she realized that the tremors were in his hands, touching her face and reaching beneath her shirt to her breasts. In the next few seconds it became obvious that he was highly excited.
They clung to each other without speaking. Finally Darya craned her head up, to stare past Hans at the sleeping forms of J’merlia and Kallik.
What about them — suppose they wake up? She was on the point of saying it. She caught herself. Shut up, dummy. What are you trying to do?
She made one concession to modesty, reaching up past him to turn the light off above the bunks. He did not seem to care; after a few more seconds, neither did Darya. Neither, she was sure, did J’merlia and Kallik.
An hour later the two aliens were still asleep. So was Hans. Darya lay with her eyes closed, reflecting that one aspect of male human behavior varied little from Fourth Alliance to Phemus Circle.
And I’m beginning to understand him better, she thought. He’s a sweet man, but he’s a strange one. A close call from death doesn’t frighten him. It makes him excited — excited enough to ignore his own taboos. I don’t think he gave Kallik and J’merlia one thought… nor did I, for that matter. I suppose it’s not the approach of death that’s the stimulus, it’s the knowledge that you survived… Maybe that’s the way with all the men of the Perimeter worlds, and the women, too. It certainly worked well for Hans.
She smiled to herself. Pity it didn’t work for me. Death doesn’t excite me, it scares me. I enjoyed myself, but I didn’t even come close. Never mind. There’ll be other chances.
At last she opened her eyes. They had not bothered to turn off the projection unit. Gargantua hung above her head, perceptibly bigger. She could see the markings on the swollen face, and the planet had turned a quarter of a revolution since the last time she had looked at it. The huge and permanent atmospheric vortex known as the Eye of Gargantua sat in the center of the disk. It was staring straight at her: orange-red, hypnotic, baleful.
Darya found herself unable to breathe.
So there’ll be other chances, will there? the Eye’s expression said. Don’t count on it. I know something about death, too.
CHAPTER 4
E. Crimson Tally: Permanent record for transfer upon return to Persephone.
Today I reached my initial destination, the planet Opal of the Dobelle system. Today I also drew a major and disturbing conclusion concerning my mission.
It is this: The decision made by Senior Technician Sue Xantippe Harbeson Ando was an appropriate one, although not for the reasons she gave me. For it turns out that the slow, inefficient method of information transfer via human channels yields information that I would never have received by direct access to the data banks. This is true for a simple reason: some important information is not in the data banks.
The central data banks of the Fourth Alliance are incomplete! Who could have foreseen that? Worse still, I now have reason to believe that they are sometimes in error, so much so that I can no longer rely on them.
I would now like to present the evidence that supports these conclusions.
Item one: My journey to Opal required that I pass through four transition points of the Bose Network. This I knew before departure. The data banks had also indicated that each Bose Transition Point serves as a nexus for the transportation of different species; thus members of the Cecropia Federation and the Zardalu Communion might be encountered there, as well as humans of the Fourth Alliance and the Phemus Circle.
This information proved accurate. At the third transition point, 290 light-years from Sol, in a region already verging on the Phemus Circle zone and adjoining both Fourth Alliance and Cecropia Federation territories, I saw and recognized Cecropians, Lo’tfians, Varnians, Hymenopts, and Ditrons.
The data banks make the relationship between these species very clear. Lo’tfians and Ditrons serve as slave species to Cecropians. Hymenopts and Varnians are sometimes free beings, but are usually slave to humans living in the territories of the Zardalu Communion. (Slave to the land-cephalopod Zardalu also, should any still exist; but none has been encountered since the Great Rising, in pre-Expansion times.)
The data banks also make it clear that, despite the independence of the Cecropian and Zardalu clades, all these species recognize the superiority of humans of the Fourth Alliance. They defer to them, acknowledging the higher nature of human intellect and achievements, and regarding Earth and surrounding Alliance territories as the cultural and scientific center of the spiral arm.
That is not the case! I, a Fourth Alliance human in outward appearance, received no preferential treatment whatsoever. In fact, quite the opposite. In the great terminus of Bose Access Node 145, I emerged to find an overcrowded transit point. To reach my required departure zone it was necessary for me to pass close to a group of other travelers, Cecropians, Zardalu humans, and Hymenopts prominent among them. My request for prompt passage was ignored. More than that, a Cecropian pushed me out of the way as though I did not exist!
When I remonstrated to another human traveler, he said, “Your first trip, is it? You’re going to run into a lot of things that aren’t in the travel guides. Or they’re going to run into you, like that Cecropian.” He laughed. “As far as she’s concerned, you don’t exist, you see. Humans are missing the right pheromones for Cecropians to detect, so they consider we’re hardly there. And anyway, since they’re an older civilization than humans, they kind of look down on us. Don’t ever hope for politeness from a Cecropian. She knows you’re an upstart little monkey. And get out of the way if she pushes; she’s a lot bigger than you.”
I do not believe that I could have received such information, except directly from a human source. It is totally inconsistent with the perspective offered by the central data base.
Item two: The Fourth Alliance central data bank indicates that Alliance science is superior to that of the other clades, and that Alliance technology is even more so.
I am forced to dispute that notion.
The first three Bose Transition Points that I passed through after leaving Sol-space were constructed and operated by Fourth Alliance humans. The fourth one, as I learned upon my arrival, was built and is maintained by the Cecropia Federation. With time to spare before my shuttle ship to Dobelle, I studied this transition point in some detail. It is obvious that the facility is technologically at least the equal of the Fourth Alliance nodes; operationally it is far better designed. Moreover, it is cleaner, safer, and less noisy.
The data bank is again misleading, for a reason I cannot conjecture. Alliance technology is not universally superior, and in at least some instances is inferior. But direct observation was necessary to draw that conclusion.
Item three: The data base indicates that humanity reached the stars employing carefully constructed and logical theories of the nature of the physical world. The laws of physics, mathematics, and logic underpin all human activities, says the data base, no matter how diverse the application.
I believe those facts may be accurate, as they relate to human history. But they seem irrelevant to current human actions on Opal. Indeed, from recent conversation
s I deduce that they apply little anywhere in the Phemus Circle. Either humans here are deranged, or they operate with a subtlety of logic beyond anything to be found in the files of the central data base.
These disturbing conclusions are drawn from my own direct observations, supplemented by discussion with natives concerning the recent traumatic events known as Summertide, as follows:
The dangers of Summertide were enormous. Death and destruction were planetwide and appalling. A logical race would have concluded that Opal is not a world suitable for human occupation and would have begun birth-limitation procedures in preparation for relocation to some new planetary environment. Such action would be consistent with the profiles of a logical humanity, as described in the central data banks.
And what did the people of Opal do, once Summertide was over? They embarked on a reproductive orgy, one guaranteed to raise the population in a few years’ time and thereby make it far more difficult to evacuate the planet. They justify this by professing — and perhaps, in truth, feeling — a powerful affection for the very place that recently killed so many of their friends and families.
And to “celebrate” their own survival, they have been inhaling and ingesting large quantities of addictive drugs and powerful carcinogens, thereby substantially shortening their already diminished life expectancies. Suspecting that for some reason the natives might be misleading me, as a newcomer, about the effects of these substances, I ingested a small amount myself on an experimental basis. My metabolism was seriously impaired for several hours.
Those ill effects were not, I should add, a consequence of my different background and origins. Indeed, I find that a similar impairment is common among the natives. And far from being puzzled by their own contralogical activities, they actually proclaim them to one another — unashamedly, and often in boastful terms.
Item four: The central language banks claim to be complete, with a full and idiomatic representation of every form of written and spoken communication in the spiral arm.
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