Each Phage has the form of a gray, regular dodecahedron, of side forty-eight meters. The surface is roughly textured, with mass sensors at the edge of each face. Maws can be opened at the center of any face, and can ingest objects of up to thirty meters' radius and of apparently indefinite length. (In E. 2238, Sawyer and S'kropa fed a solid silicaceous fragment of cylindrical cross-section and twenty-five meters' radius to a Phage of the Dendrite Artifact. With an ingestion rate of one kilometer per day, four hundred and twenty-five kilometers of material, corresponding to the full length of the fragment, were absorbed. No mass change was detected in the Phage, nor any change in any other of its physical parameters.)
Phages are capable of slow independent locomotion, with a mean rate of one or two meters per standard day. No Phage has ever been seen to move at a velocity in excess of one meter per hour with respect to the local frame.
Intended Purpose: Unknown. Were it not for the fact that Phages have been found in association with over three hundred of the twelve hundred known artifacts, and only in such association, any relationship to the Builders would be questioned. They differ greatly in scale and number from all other Builder constructs.
It has been speculated that the Phages served as general scavengers for the Builders, since they are apparently able to ingest and break down any materials made by the clades, and anything made by the Builders with the single exception of the structural hulls and the paraforms (e.g., the external shell of Paradox, the surface of Sentinel, and the concentric hollow tubes of Maelstrom).
—From the Lang Universal Artifact Catalog, Fourth Edition.
CHAPTER 12
Summertide
minus eleven.
Darya Lang had the terrible suspicion that she had wasted half her life. Back on Sentinel Gate she had believed it when her family told her that she lived in the best place in the universe: "Sentinel Gate, half a step from Paradise," the saying went. And with her research facilities and her communications network, she had seen no need to travel.
But first Opal, and now Quake, taught her otherwise. She loved the newness of the experience, the contact with a world where everything was strange and exciting. From the moment she stepped out of the capsule onto the dry, dusty surface of Quake, she felt all her senses intensify by a factor of a hundred.
Her nose said it first. The air of Quake held a powerful mixture of odors. That was the scent of flowers, surely, but not the lush, lavish extravagances that garlanded Sentinel Gate. She had to seek them out—and there they were, not five paces in front of her, tiny bell-shaped blooms of lilac and lavender that peeped out from a gray-green cover of wiry gorse. The plants hugged the sides of a long, narrow crevice too small to be called a valley. From their miniature blossoms came an urgent midday perfume, out of all proportion to their size. It was as though flowering, fertilization, and seeding could not wait another hour.
And maybe it can't, Darya thought. For overlaid on that heady scent was a sinister, sulfurous tinge of distant vulcanism: the breath of Quake, approaching Summertide. She paused, breathed deep, and knew she would remember the mixture of smells forever.
Then she sneezed, and sneezed again. There was fine dust in the air, irritant powdery particles that tickled the nose.
She raised her eyes, looking beyond the miniature valley with its carpet of urgent flowers, out beyond the plain to a smoky horizon fifteen kilometers away. The effects of dust were easy to see there. Where the nearby surface stood out in harsh umbers and ochres, in the distance a gray pall had darkened and softened the artist's palette, painting everything in muted tones. The horizon itself was not visible, except that to the east her eye traced—or imagined—a faint line of volcanic peaks, cinnamon-hued and jagged.
Mandel stood high in the sky. As she watched, it began to creep behind the shielding bulk of Opal. The brilliant crescent shrank, moment by moment. At the present time of year there would be no more than partial eclipse, but it was enough to change the character of the light. The redder tones of Amaranth bled into the landscape. Quake's surface became a firelit landscape of subterranean gloom.
At that moment Darya heard the first voice of Summertide. A low rumble filled the air, like the complaining snore of a sleepy giant. The ground trembled. She felt a quiver and a pleasant tingle in the soles of her feet.
"Professor Lang," J'merlia said from behind her. "Atvar H'sial reminds you that we have far to go, and little time. If we might proceed . . ."
Darya realized that she had not yet completed her first step onto Quake's surface, and Atvar H'sial and J'merlia were still standing on the ladder from the capsule. As Darya moved out of the way the Cecropian crept past her and stood motionless, broad head sweeping from side to side. J'merlia came to crouch beneath the front of the carapace.
Darya watched the trumpet-horn ears as they swept across the scene. What did Atvar H'sial "see" when she listened to Quake? What did those exquisite organs of smell "hear," when every airborne molecule could tell a story?
They had talked about the world as it was perceived by echolocation, but the explanation was unsatisfying. The best analogy that Darya could create was of a human standing on the seabed, in a place where the water was turbid and the light level low. Everything was monochrome vision, with a range of only a few tens of meters.
But the analogy was inadequate. Atvar H'sial was sensitive to a huge range of sound frequencies, and she could certainly "see" the distant mutter of the volcanoes. Those signals lacked the fine spatial resolution offered by her own sonar, but they were definite sensory inputs.
And there were other factors, perhaps even other senses, that Darya was only vaguely aware of; for instance, at the moment the Cecropian was lifting one forelimb and pointing off to the middle distance. Was she sensing the waft of distant odors, with olfactory lobes so acute that every trace of smell told a story?
"There is animal life here," J'merlia translated. "And winged forms. This suggests another possible method of surviving Summertide, unmentioned by Commander Perry. By remaining in Quake's Mandel-shadow, and always aloft, these would be safe."
Darya could see the flying creatures—just. They were half a meter long, with dark bodies and gauzy, diaphanous wings; too delicate, surely, to survive the turbulence of Summertide. Far more likely, they had already laid their eggs and would die in the next few days. But Atvar H'sial was right about one thing: there were many facts about Quake that humans did not know, or Max Perry was not telling.
The thought came to her again: this was a whole planet, a world with its own intricate life-balance; hundreds of millions of square kilometers of land and small lakes, empty of humans or other intelligence, spread out for their inspection. Infinite diversity was possible there, but it would take a lifetime to explore and know it.
Right, her more practical side said. But we don't have a whole lifetime. In eighty hours we'd better be finished with our exploration and on our way.
Leaving Atvar H'sial to her sightless sweep of the landscape, Darya moved around the foot of the Umbilical to the line of aircars. There were eight of them, sitting under the lee of their protective sheet of Builder material. The apron they stood on was connected by silicon fiber cables to the Umbilical itself and would lift with it at Summertide.
Darya climbed into one of the cars and inspected its controls. As Atvar H'sial had foretold, the vehicle was human-made and identical with the one that they had used for travel on Opal. It was fully charged, and Darya could fly it with no problem, provided—and at the thought, her collarbone gave a twinge of reminder—that they did not hit a storm like the one that had wiped them out last time.
She held up an open hand to test the wind. At the moment it was no more than a stiff breeze, nothing to worry about. Even allowing for the twisting pockets of dust, visibility was at least three or four kilometers. That was ample for a landing, and they could fly far above any sandstorm.
At her urging, Atvar H'sial and J'merlia climbed into the car and settled in fo
r the flight. Darya took them up at once, heading for an altitude that would clear any turbulence. J'merlia squatted by her side in the front of the car. Darya had explained the aircar controls to him when they were flying on Opal, and if necessary he could probably pilot the craft. But apparently he would never dream of trying to do so without direction from Atvar H'sial.
Darya tried to talk with him and failed. She had imagined that he might behave differently toward her after their conversations while they were recuperating from the crash. She was wrong. When Atvar H'sial was present he refused to make an independent move, and for the first three hours of the trip he spoke only at Atvar H'sial's direction.
But in the fourth hour J'merlia made a move of his own, unprompted by his mistress. He suddenly sat upright and pointed. "There. Above."
They were cruising on autopilot at twenty thousand meters, far above most of Quake's atmosphere and out of reach of surface storms. Darya had not been looking up. She had been surveying the ground ahead of them, using the car's imaging sensors. At top resolution she could see plenty of evidence of life on Quake. The lake-dotted hill ranges bore great herds of white-backed animals, moving away from the high ground and heading for water as steadily and inexorably as a retreating wave. She watched their compact mass divide and break around bare ridges and massive boulders. A few kilometers farther on, the hill country ended, and she saw wriggling lines of dark green, following and defining the moist gravel of streambeds. The dry streams ended in dense pockets of vegetation, impenetrable from above, lining the bottom of hollows of uncertain depth.
As Darya looked up at J'merlia's words, he leaned over her shoulder and pointed with a thin, multijointed arm into the blue-black and starlit sky.
Atvar H'sial hissed. "Another car," J'merlia translated. "We have been pursued up the Umbilical, and much more quickly than we expected."
The moving light was right above them, following their own ground track but at much greater altitude. It was also rapidly outdistancing them. Darya allowed the autopilot to continue the flight while she rotated the high-mag sensor to take a closer look at the newcomer.
"No," she said after a few moments. "It's not an aircar." She set the car's little on-board computer to work, computing a trajectory. "It's too high, and it's moving much too fast. And look—it's growing brighter. We're not looking at an aircar's lights."
"Then what is it?"
"It's a spaceship. And that bright glow means it's entering Quake's atmosphere." Darya glanced at the computer output, providing a first estimate of the other ship's final trajectory. "We'd better put down for a while and consider what we do next."
"No." Atvar H'sial's thoughts came as a mutter of protest from J'merlia.
"I know; I don't want to, either," Darya said. "But we have to, unless you know something I don't. The computer needs a few more points of tracking data to be sure, but it's already giving us a preliminary result. That ship is landing. I don't know who is in it, but it will touch down just where we don't want it—a few kilometers from our own destination."
Twilight on Quake—if so sudden and ominous a nightfall, red as dragon's blood, could justify that description.
Mandel would rise in three hours. Amaranth lay low on the horizon, its ruddy face obscured by clouds of dust. Gargantua alone shone in full splendor, a banded marble of orange and salmon-pink.
The aircar stood on a level patch of gravel, readied for rapid takeoff. Darya Lang had set them down between two small water bodies, in an area shown on the map to be liberally scattered with miniature freshwater lakes.
The map had lied in at least one respect. Atvar H'sial, crouched down by one of the ponds, had sucked water noisily through her proboscis. J'merlia pronounced it potable. But Darya, tasting the same pool, spat in disgust and wondered about Cecropian metabolism. The lake water was harsh and bitter to the tongue, filled with strong alkalines. She could not drink it, and would have to rely on the car's supplies.
Darya walked back past the car and prepared for sleep. Even with the help of the autopilot, the journey around Quake had been a strain. Harmless as the planet below her seemed, she had not dared to lower her concentration for more than a moment; and now finally free to relax, she could not do so.
There was too much to see, too much to speculate on.
According to Perry, Quake so close to Summertide should have been an inferno. The crust ought to have been heaving and shattered, surface ablaze with brush fires, plants shriveled and dying in air burning hot and close to unbreathable. The animals should have been long gone, already dead or estivating far below the surface.
Instead she could breath and walk and sit in moderate comfort, and there were ample signs all about her of energetic life. Darya had set her camp bed outside, close to one of the pools and in the shade of a thicket of horsetails. She could hear animals scuttling through them, ignoring her presence, and the ground by the water was riddled with holes of all different sizes, as a variety of small creatures tunneled underground. When the distant growl of thunder or vulcanism died away, she could hear those workers, scrabbling steadily deeper into the drying earth.
But it was warm, she would admit that. The disappearance of Mandel from the sky had brought little relief. Sweat stained her suit and ran down the hollow of her neck.
She lay down on her camp bed. Although Quake seemed safe enough, she was worried about what they should do next. That spaceship must be from Opal, and it had probably been sent to drag them back there. If they went on, they might be captured and forced to leave Quake. But if they did not keep going, they would not reach their destination.
While she was pondering that, Atvar H'sial surprised her by coming across and offering a meal of Opal fruit and bottled water. Darya took it and nodded her thanks. That was a shared gesture. The Cecropian nodded back and retreated to the interior of the aircar.
As Darya ate she wondered about her two companions. She had never seen either of them eat. Perhaps, like the people on some Alliance worlds, they regarded the taking of food as a private function. Or maybe they were like the tortoises on Opal, who according to the crewmen at Starside Port could survive quite happily for a full year on just water. But then why would Atvar H'sial think to feed the human of the group?
She lay back on the camp bed, pulled the waterproof sheet up to her neck, and watched the heavens reeling above her. The stars moved so fast . . . on Sentinel Gate, with its thirty-eight-hour day, the swing of the starry vault was almost imperceptible. Which direction in space did her homeworld lie? She puzzled over the unfamiliar constellations. That way . . . or that . . . Her mind drifted off toward the stars. She wrenched her thoughts back with an effort to the present. She still had a decision to make.
Should they proceed to the place that her calculations pointed to as the focus of activity at Summertide? They could go, knowing that others would be there also. Or should she hang back and wait? Or should they go just partway, pause for a while . . .
Go partway, pause . . .
Darya Lang passed easily into a deep sleep, a dreamless slumber so profound that nearby noise and vibration did not wake her. Brief dawn came; day passed, and again it was night and flaming day. The sounds of tunneling animals ended. Opal and Quake had made two complete turns about each other before Darya drifted back to consciousness.
She woke slowly to the half day of Amaranth's light. It was a full minute before she knew where she was, another before she felt ready to sit up and look around her.
Atvar H'sial and J'merlia were nowhere to be seen. The aircar was gone. A small heap of supplies and equipment had been placed under a thin rainproof sheet next to the camp bed. Nothing else, from horizon to horizon, suggested that humans or aliens had ever been there.
She dropped to her knees and scrabbled through the pile, searching for a message. There was no note, no recording, no sign. Nothing that might help her except a few containers of food and drink, a miniature signal generator, a gun, and a flashlight.
D
arya looked at her watch. Nine more Dobelle days. Seventy-two hours to go before the worst Summertide ever. And she was stranded on Quake, alone, six thousand kilometers from the safety of the Umbilical . . .
The panic that she had felt on first leaving Sentinel Gate crept back into her heart.
CHAPTER 13
. . . the orange glow on the horizon was continuous, the burning ground reflecting from high dust clouds. As they watched, a new burst of crimson arose, no more than a kilometer from where they stood. It developed smoky tendrils and grew taller. Soon it stretched from earth to sky. As the lava bubbled to the summit of the crater he turned to Amy.
In spite of his warning she still stood outside the car. When the flash of the explosion was replaced by a glow of red-hot lava she clapped her hands, entranced by the colors and the shapes. Shock waves of sound rolled and echoed from the hills behind. The stream of fire crested the cone and began to roll toward them, as easy-flowing and fast as running water. Where it touched the cooler earth, white flux sputtered and sparked.
Max stared at her face. He saw no fear, only the rapt entrancement of a child at a birthday party.
That was what it was. She saw it all as a fireworks display. Caution had to come from him. He leaned forward from the car seat to pluck at her sleeve.
"Get in." He was forced to shout to be heard. "We have to start back for the Stalk. You know it's a five-hour journey."
She glared at him and pulled away. He knew the pout very well. "Not now, Max." He read the words from her lips, but he could not hear her. "I want to wait until the lava reaches the water."
"No!" He was yelling. "Absolutely not. I'll take no more risks! It's boiling hot out there, and it's getting nearly as bad in the car."
She was walking away, not listening to him. He felt tight-chested and overheated despite the air curtain that held a sheath of cooler air at the open hatch. It was mostly in his mind, he knew that—the fiery furnace of his own worries that consumed him. And yet the outside heat was real enough. He stumbled out of the car and followed her across the steaming surface.
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