J'merlia and Kallik seemed fairly normal—but only because Darya did not know how to read in their alien bodies the signs of stress and injury. J'merlia was meticulously removing white dust from his legs, using the soft pads of his forelimbs. He seemed little worried by anything except personal hygiene. Kallik, after a quick shiver along her body that threw a generous layer of powder away from her and produced protests from the rest of the aircar's occupants, was stretching up to full height and staring bright-eyed at everything. If anyone was still optimistic, maybe it was the little Hymenopt. Unfortunately, only J'merlia could communicate with her.
Darya looked at Hans Rebka. He was obviously exhausted, but he was still their best hope. He had deep red lines on his face, scored by his mask and respirator, and there were owlish pale circles of dust around his eyes. But when he caught her look he managed a grin and a wink.
Darya squeezed in and had just enough room to slide the door closed. She had never expected to see so many beings, human or alien, in one small aircar. The official capacity was four people. The Carmel twins had managed to fit into one seat, but J'merlia was crouched on the floor where he could see or hear little, and Darya Lang and Max Perry had been left standing.
"What's the time?" Rebka asked unexpectedly. "I mean, how many hours to Summertide?"
"Fifteen." Perry's voice was expressionless.
"So what's next? We can't just sit here and wait to die. Anything's easier than that. Let's look at our options. We can't reach the Umbilical, even if it goes no higher. And there's no place on Quake that we can go to be safe. Suppose we fly as high as we can and ride it out in this car?"
Kallik gave a series of whistling snorts that sounded to Darya Lang very like derision, while Perry roused himself from his reverie and shook his head. "I went through all those ideas, long ago," he said gloomily. "We're down to an eight-hour power supply for the aircar, and that's with normal load. If we get off the ground—it's not clear that we can, with so many on board—we'll be down again before Summertide Maximum."
"Suppose we sit here and wait until four or five hours before Summertide," Rebka suggested. "And then take off? We'd be clear of the surface during the worst time."
"Sorry. That won't work, either." Perry glared at Kallik, who was bobbing up and down to an accompaniment of clicks and whistles. "We'd never manage to stay in the air. The volcanoes and earthquakes turn the whole atmosphere into one mass of turbulence." He turned to the Lo'tfian. "J'merlia, tell Kallik to keep quiet. It's hard enough to think without that noise."
The Hymenopt bobbed even higher and whistled, "Sh-sh-sheep."
"Kallik asks me to point out," J'merlia said, "with great respect, you are all forgetting the ship."
"Louis Nenda's ship?" Rebka asked. "The one that Kallik came in? We don't know where it is. Anyway, Nenda and Atvar H'sial will have taken it."
Kallik let loose a louder series of whistles and wriggled her body in anguish.
"No, no. Kallik says humbly, she is talking about the Summer Dreamboat, the ship that the Carmel twins came in to Quake. We know exactly where that is."
"But its drive is exhausted," Perry said. "Remember, Kallik looked at it when we first found it."
"One moment, please." J'merlia wriggled his way past Julius Graves and the Carmel twins, until he was crouched close to the Hymenopt. The two of them grunted and whistled at each other for half a minute. Finally J'merlia bobbed his head and straightened up.
"Kallik apologizes to everyone for her extreme stupidity, but she did not make herself sufficiently clear when she examined the ship. The power for the Bose Drive is certainly exhausted, and the ship cannot be used for star travel. But there could be just enough power for one local journey—maybe for one jump to orbit."
Rebka was maneuvering past Julius Graves to the pilot's seat before J'merlia had finished speaking. "How far to that starship, and where is it?" He was examining the car's status board.
"Seven thousand kilometers, on a great circle path to the Pentacline Depression." Perry had emerged from his gloom and was pushing past the Carmel twins to join Rebka. "But this close to Summertide we can expect a sidewind all the way, strong and getting worse. That will knock at least a thousand off our range."
"So there's no margin." Rebka was doing a quick calculation. "We have enough power for about eight thousand, but not if we try for full speed. And if we slow down, we'll be flying closer to Summertide, and conditions will be worse."
"It is our best chance." Graves spoke for the first time since entering the aircar. "But can we get off the ground with this much load? We had a hard time getting here, and that was with two people less."
"And can we stay in the air, so close to Summertide?" Perry added. "The winds will be incredible."
"And even if Kallik is right," Graves said, "and there is a little power still in the starship, can the Summer Dreamboat make it to orbit?"
But Rebka was already starting the engine. "It's not our best chance, Councilor," he said as the downjets blew a cloud of white dust up to cover the windows. "It's our only chance. What do you want, a written guarantee? Get set and hold your breath. Unless someone has a better idea in the next five seconds, I'm going to push this car to the limit. Hold tight, and let's hope the engine wants to cooperate."
CHAPTER 20
Summertide
minus one.
As the aircar lurched from the ground and struggled upward, Darya Lang felt useless. She was supercargo, added load, a dumb weight unable to help the pilot or navigator in front of her. Helpless to contribute and unable to relax, she took a new look at her fellow passengers.
This was the group who would live or die together—and soon, before the rotating dumbbell of Quake and Opal had completed one more turn.
She studied them as the car droned onward. They were a depressed and depressing sight. The situation had turned back the clock, revealing them to Lang as they must have been long years earlier, before Quake entered their lives.
Elena and Geni Carmel, sitting cheek to cheek, were little girls lost. Unable to find their way out of the wood, they waited to be saved; or, far more likely, for the monster to arrive. In front of them Hans Rebka was crouched over the controls, a small, worried boy trying to play a game that was too grown-up for him. Next to him sat Max Perry, lost in some old, unhappy dream that he would share with no one.
Only Julius Graves, to Perry's right, failed to fit the pattern of backward-turning time. The councilor's face when he turned to the rear of the car had never been young. Thousands of years of misery were carved in its lines and roughened surface; human history, written dark and angry and desperate.
She stared at him in bewilderment. This was not the Council member of Alliance legend. Where was the kindness, the optimism, the crackling manic energy?
She knew the answer: snuffed out, by simple exhaustion.
For the first time, Darya realized the importance of fatigue in deciding human affairs. She had noticed her own gradual loss of interest in deciphering the riddle of Quake and the Builders, and she had attributed it to her concentration on simple survival. But now she blamed the enervating poisons of weariness and tension.
The same slow drain of energy was affecting all of them. At a time when thought and prompt action could make the difference between life and death, they were mentally and physically flat. Every one—she was surely no exception—looked like a zombie. They might rise for a few seconds to full attention and alertness, as she had at the moment of takeoff, but as soon as the panic was over they would slump back to lethargy. The faces that turned to her, even with all the white dust wiped off them, were pale and drawn.
She knew how they were feeling. Her own emotions were on ice. She could not feel terror, or love, or anger. That was the most frightening development, the new indifference to living or dying. She hardly cared what happened next. Over the past few days Quake had not struck her down with its violence, but it had drained her, bled her of all human passions.
<
br /> Even the two aliens had lost their usual bounce. Kallik had produced a small computer and was busy with obscure calculations of her own. J'merlia seemed lost and bewildered without Atvar H'sial. He swiveled his head around constantly, as though seeking his lost master, and kept rubbing his hand-pads obsessively over his hard-shelled body.
Perry, Graves, and Rebka were wedged into the front row, in a seat meant for two. The twins and J'merlia sat behind them, probably more comfortable than anyone else, while Darya Lang and Kallik had squeezed into an area at the rear designed only for baggage. It was tall enough for the Hymenopt, but Kallik had the reflex habit of shaking like a wet dog to remove residual powder from her short black fur. She had Darya sneezing and bending her head forward all the time to avoid contact with the car's curved roof.
Worst of all, those in the back could see only a sliver of sky out of the forward window. Information on progress or problems had to come from the warnings and comments of those in front.
And sometimes they arrived too late.
"Sorry," Perry called, two seconds after the car had been slewed, tilted, and dropped fifty meters by a terrific gust of wind. "That was a bad one."
Darya Lang rubbed the back of her head and agreed. She had banged it on the hard plastic ceiling of the cargo compartment. There would be a nasty bruise—if she lived so long.
She leaned forward and cradled her head on her arms. In spite of noise and danger and sickening instability of motion, her thoughts began drifting off. Her previous life as an archeo-scientist on Sentinel Gate now seemed wholly artificial. How many times, in assembling the Lang catalog of artifacts, had she placidly written of whole expeditions, "No survivors"? It was a neat and tidy phrase, one that required no explanation and called for no thought. The element that was missing was the tragedy of the event, and the infinite subjective time that it might have taken to happen. Those "No survivors" entries suggested a clean extinction, a group of people snuffed out as quickly and impartially as a candle flame. Far more likely were situations like the present one: slow extinction of hope as the group clutched at every chance and saw each one fade.
Darya's spirits spiraled down further. Death was rarely quick and clean and painless, unless it also came as a surprise. More often it was slow, agonizing, and degrading.
A calm voice pulled her up from tired despair.
"Get ready in the back there." Hans Rebka sounded far from doomed and defeated. "We're too low, and we're too slow. At this rate we'll run out of power and we'll run out of time. So we have to get above the clouds. Hold on tight again. We're in for a rough few minutes."
Hold on to what? But Rebka's words and his cheerful tone told her that not everyone had given up fighting.
Ashamed of herself, Darya tried to wedge more tightly into the luggage compartment as the car buffeted its way up through the uneven lower edge of the clouds. The textured glow outside was replaced by a bland, muddy light. More violent turbulence began at once, hitting from every direction and throwing the overloaded vehicle easily and randomly about the sky like a paper toy. No matter what Rebka and Perry did at the controls, the car had too much weight to maneuver well.
Darya tried to predict the motion and failed. She could not tell if they were rising, falling, or heading for a fatal downspin. Bits of the car's ceiling fixtures seemed to come at her head from every side. Just as she felt certain that the next blow would knock her unconscious, four jointed arms took her firmly around the waist. She reached out to grasp a soft, pudgy body, clinging to it desperately as the car veered and dipped and jerked through the sky.
Kallik was pushing her, forcing her toward the wall. She buried her face in velvety fur, bent her legs up to her right, and pushed back. Braced against each other and the car's walls, she and Kallik found a new stability of position. She shoved harder, wondering if the rocky ride would ever end.
"We're almost there. Shield your eyes." Rebka's voice sounded through the cabin intercom a moment before the swoops and sickening uplifts eased. As the flight became smoother, blinding light flooded into the car, replacing the diffuse red-brown glow.
Darya heard a loud, clucking set of snorts from her right. J'merlia wriggled around in his seat to face the back of the car.
"Kallik wishes to offer her humble apologies," he said, "for what she did. She assures you that she would never in normal circumstances dare to touch the person of a superior being. And she wonders now if you might kindly release her."
Darya realized that she was clinging to soft black fur and crushing the Hymenopt in a bear hug, while still pushing her toward the far wall of the car. She let go at once, feeling embarrassed. The Hymenopt was far too polite to say anything, but she must recognize blind panic when she saw it.
"Tell Kallik that it was good that she took hold of me. What she did helped a lot, and no apology is needed." And if I'm a superior being, Darya added silently, I'd hate to know what an inferior one feels like.
Embarrassed or not, Darya was beginning to feel a bit better. The flight was smoother, while the whistle of air past the car suggested that they were moving much faster. Even her own aches and fatigue had somehow eased.
"We've just about doubled our airspeed, and it should be smooth sailing up here." Rebka's voice over the intercom seemed to justify her changing mood.
"But we had a hard time coming through those clouds," he went on. "And Commander Perry has recalculated our rate of power use. Given the distance we have to go, we're right on the edge. We have to conserve. I'll slow down a little, and I'm going to turn off the air-conditioning system. That will make it pretty bad here up front. Be ready to rotate seats, and make sure you drink lots of liquid."
It had not occurred to Darya Lang that her limited view of the sky might be an advantage. But as the internal temperature of the car began to rise, she was glad to be sitting in the shielded rear. The people in the front had the same stifling air as she did, plus direct and intolerable sunlight.
The full effects of that did not hit her until it was time to play musical chairs and move around the car's cramped interior. The change of position was a job for contortionists. When it was completed, Darya found herself in the front seat, next to the window. For the first time since takeoff, she could see more than a tiny bit of the car's surroundings.
They were skimming along just above cloud level, riding over individual crests that caught and scattered the light like sea breakers of dazzling gold and crimson. Mandel and Amaranth were almost straight ahead, striking down at the car with a fury never felt on the cloud-protected surfaces of Opal and Quake. The two stars had grown to giant, blinding orbs in a near-black sky. Even with the car's photo-shielding at maximum, the red and yellow spears of light thrown by the stellar partners were too bright to look at.
The perspiration ran in rivulets down Darya's face and soaked her clothing. As she watched, the positions of Mandel and Amaranth changed in the sky. Everything was happening faster and faster. She sensed the rushing tempo of events as the twin suns and Dobelle hurried to their point of closest approach.
And they were not the only players.
Darya squinted off to the side. Gargantua was there, a pale shadow of Mandel and its dwarf companion. But that, too, would change. Soon Gargantua would be the largest object in Quake's sky, sweeping closer than any body in the stellar system, rivaling Mandel and Amaranth with its ripping tidal forces.
She looked out and down, wondering what was going on below those boiling cloud layers. Soon they would have to descend through them, but perhaps the hidden surface beneath was already too broken to permit a landing. Or maybe the ship they sought had already vanished, swallowed up in some massive new earth fissure.
Darya turned away from the window and closed her aching eyes. The outside brightness was just too overwhelming. She could not stand the heat and searing radiation for one moment longer.
Except that she had no choice.
She looked to her left. Kallik was next to her, crouched down lo
w to the floor. Beyond her, in the pilot's seat, Max Perry was holding a square of opaque plastic in front of his face to give him partial shielding from the sluice of light.
"How much longer?" The question came as a feeble croak.
Darya hardly recognized her own voice. She was not sure what question she was asking. Did she mean how long until they could all change seats again? Or until they arrived at their destination? Or only until they were all dead?
It made no difference. Perry did not answer. He merely handed her a bottle of lukewarm water. She took a mouthful and made Kallik do the same. Then there was nothing to do but sit and sweat and endure, until the welcome distraction of changing seats.
Darya lost track of time. She knew that she was in and out of the torture seat at the front at least three times. It felt like weeks, until at last Julius Graves was shaking her and warning, "Get ready for turbulence. We're going down through the clouds."
"We're there?" she whispered. "Let's go down."
She could hardly wait. No matter what happened next, she would escape the roasting torture of the two suns. She would dream of them for the rest of her life.
"No. Not there." Graves sounded the way she felt. He was mopping perspiration from his bald head. "We're running out of power."
That grabbed her attention. "Where are we?"
But he had turned the other way. It was Elena Carmel, in the rear seat, who leaned forward and replied. "If the instruments are right, we're very close. Almost to our ship."
"How close?"
"Ten kilometers. Maybe even less. They say it all depends how much power is left to use in hovercraft mode."
Darya said nothing more. Ten kilometers, five kilometers, what difference did it make? She couldn't walk one kilometer, not to save her life.
Convergent Series Page 22
