Darya allowed him to lead her to a doorway, three entrances farther around the room's perimeter. "It's hard to see why Glister is here at all," she said. "But it's not the prize mystery."
"Plenty of choices for that." Rebka sounded weary, but Darya knew from experience that he would ignore fatigue until he actually collapsed. "I can list a bundle," he went on. "The fast Phages. The atmosphere on the surface. The way we got inside. The equipment that provides air and water. The Lotus field in the chamber we just left. They're all candidates. Take your pick."
"You haven't listed the one most on my mind." The path was spiraling down, heading in a gentle, curving ramp toward the middle of Glister. Darya was thirsty—and suddenly so hungry that it was hard to think of anything else.
How long since she had eaten? It felt like forever. Her mind might have been switched off for three hours, but her stomach had not been. It kept careful track of missed meals.
"The tough one is this," she said at last. "Why did the orange cloud on the surface let Kallik pass through untouched, but grab us, and Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial, and bring us down here? There's something on Glister that knows the difference between humans, Cecropians, and Hymenopts. That's the biggest mystery of all."
ENTRY 19: HYMENOPT.
Distribution: The Hymenopt cladeworld is not definitely known, but it is believed to be one of the eighty worlds subjected to large-scale surface reshaping by the Zardalu, roughly twenty thousand years ago.
Hymenopt societies flourish today on eighteen of those worlds, having been transported there by the Zardalu and abandoned at the time of the Great Rising. Eight of these colonies subsequently became technologically advanced enough to achieve interplanetary travel. One Hymenopt world was an independent discoverer of the Bose Drive, but for cultural reasons it limited its use.
After the Great Rising the Hymenopt worlds were lost from spiral-arm communication, until finally they were rediscovered by the Decantil Survey and Census of territories of the Zardalu Communion.
Since then, slave Hymenopts have been taken to all worlds of the Communion, and also to dozens of planets of the Cecropia Federation. The total Hymenopt population is unknown, but certainly it is in the tens of billions.
Physical Characteristics: The Hymenopts in their own colonies contain six separate functional groups, designated as Regents, Recorders, Defenders, Feeders, Breeders, and Workers. There is a progression among these forms, in that Breeders following metamorphosis become Feeders, and finally Regents, while Defenders in the later stages of their lives become Recorders. Workers maintain the same form all their lives.
It should be noted that the only Hymenopts employed as slaves are the Workers. The others do not leave their colonies. Thus when another species of the spiral arm refers to "a Hymenopt," that is by implication a Hymenopt Worker. The following physical description applies to them alone.
Hymenopt Workers are sterile female eight-legged arthropods. The paws on all limbs are prehensile and capable of the manipulation of small objects; however, only the four forelimbs are normally used for delicate work. Despite the fancied resemblance of the Hymenopt Workers to the Earth Hymenoptera, which led to their naming by Decantil survey biologists, the physiological similarity is at best superficial. The Hymenopts do, however, possess a tough exoskeleton and a powerful sting at the end of the rounded abdomen. (This, combined with their speed of movement, suggests that the slavery of a Hymenopt Worker is a matter of choice and habit, rather than force.)
Hymenopts see with a ring of simple (i.e., not compound) eyes, circling a smooth head. The need for all-around vision encourages them to remain upright on most occasions, although for rapid movement they revert to a horizontal position. The Hymenopts' eyes are sensitive to a range of wavelengths from 0.3 to 1.0 micrometers, which more than spans the range of human optics. Their sensitivity to low light levels is superior to that of humans; this has led some exobiologists to offer an unconvincing identification of the Hymenopt cladeworld based on fainter sunlight and stellar spectral properties.
History: The earliest history of the Hymenopts has been lost, together with knowledge of their cladeworld. Today, the planet of Ker is generally considered to be the center of Hymenopt civilization, and it is certainly the principal storage point for Hymenopt records.
It was on Ker that the Bose Drive was discovered, seven thousand years ago. That invention led to a dominance of Ker among other Hymenopts which has never been challenged. According to the Ker archives, some form of Hymenopt oral history and race memory extends back sixty thousand generations. Since a breeding cycle lasts for seventy standard years, Hymenopts have therefore been intelligent, with a well-developed language, for over half a million years. By contrast, written records on Ker go back less than ten thousand.
Ker is the moving force, main market center, and principal beneficiary of the sale of Hymenopt slaves. Its inhabitants are eager to maintain that role, and they follow general Hymenopt practice by discouraging interaction and commerce with any other species, except for the purpose of Hymenopt slave trading.
Culture: In the Hymenopt worlds, societal control equals breeding control. Since the other five groups are sterile, the Breeders in principle possess unique power; however, each Breeder knows that she will one day undergo metamorphosis to Feeder (responsible for feeding the young) and then to Regent (responsible for all colony development decisions). These three groups therefore cooperate to constitute the "Superior Triad" of Hymenopt culture, with the Workers, Recorders, and Defenders forming the "Inferior Triad." It would be unthinkable for one member of the Superior Triad to sell another member for use as a slave.
Crossbreeding outside the colony is recognized as genetically beneficial, but travel is tightly controlled. It is approved in advance, and applies only to mating. No Hymenopt colony desires, or permits, uncontrolled transfers of individuals. This factor, more than any other, limits Hymenopt interest in interstellar, or even interplanetary, commerce. The slave trade of Ker is the single significant exception.
—From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients).
CHAPTER 11
The following facts were deemed too anecdotal for the formality of the Universal Catalog (Subclass: Sapients). Few beings of the spiral arm, however, would dispute them:
AN ADULT HYMENOPT HAS REFLEXES TEN TIMES AS FAST AS ANY HUMANS.
A HYMENOPT CAN RUN A HUNDRED METERS IN LESS THAN TWO SECONDS.
USED IN CONCERT, A HYMENOPT'S EIGHT TRIPLE-JOINTED LEGS WILL PROPEL HER TEN METERS INTO THE AIR UNDER TWO STANDARD GRAVITIES.
THE RETRACTED YELLOW STING IN THE END OF A HYMENOPT'S STUBBY ABDOMEN CAN BE READIED IN A FRACTION OF A SECOND TO DELIVER STIMULANTS, ANESTHETICS, HALLUCINOGENS, OR LETHAL NEUROTOXINS. THEY ARE EFFECTIVE ON ALL KNOWN INTELLIGENT ORGANISMS.
WITH VOLUNTARILY REDUCED METABOLISM, A HYMENOPT CAN SURVIVE FOR FIVE MONTHS WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER; ENCYSTED, SHE WILL ENDURE FOR FOUR TIMES AS LONG.
A HYMENOPT IS AS INTELLIGENT AS A CECROPIAN OR A HUMAN, WITH MORE MENTAL STAMINA THAN EITHER.
Kallik, of course, knew all these things. And yet it never occurred to her that her own slave status was in any way unnatural. In fact, she thought it inevitable. Her race memory extended back well over ten thousand years, to the time when every Hymenopt had been a slave.
Hymenopt race memory lacked the precision of nerve-cell memory. The few billion bits available for its total storage reduced recollection to a mere caricature of the original direct experience. Yet the brain, insistent on offering race memories in the same format as other experiences, clothed the skeleton of recollection in a synthetic flesh of its own creation.
Thus, Kallik "remembered" the long enslavement of her species as a series of visual flashes; but no amount of effort would make those images detailed. If she made the attempt, the result was the product of her own imagination.
She could make a picture in her mind of the Zardalu, the land-cephalopod masters who had ruled the thousand worlds of the Zard
alu Communion until the Great Rising. If she thought hard, she could make specific images: of stony beaks, big and strong enough to crush a Hymenopt's body . . . but she could not see how they fitted to the Zardalu body. Of huge, round eyes . . . but they were floating free and disembodied, high above her head. Of hulking bodies, girthed with supporting straps and slick with fatty secretions that allowed the Masters to survive on land . . . but the legs that carried those bodies were vague shadow legs, undefined in size, color, or number.
She had only the most confused memory of the disappearance of the Zardalu: her mind fed back a whirl of flying bodies, a green fire, a world turned black, a sun exploding. And then, great calm; an absence of all Zardalu images.
For Kallik's social class, the Great Rising and the vanishing of the tyrant Zardalu brought little change. She had been born a Worker; had she remained on the Homeworld she would have remained one. Her role would always have been Worker, rather than Regent, Recorder, Defender, Feeder, or Breeder. She had been bred for slavery, born for slavery, raised for slavery, and sold for slavery. Nothing made her so uncomfortable as a total absence of masters. She needed them—humans, Cecropians, or Hymenopts.
The disappearance of Lang and Rebka stimulated her to frantic activity. She moved at once to make a low-altitude survey of the surface of Glister, traversing the slowly rotating planetoid on a path that would allow a close inspection of every square meter.
The survey took over an hour. It was wasted time. Kallik remained convinced that Glister was hollow, but the sphere showed no trace of external structure. Nothing suggested a way to reach the hidden interior. If fact, if Kallik had not seen, with her own multiple pairs of black eyes, that sparkling cloud absorbed into the surface, she would have judged Glister's exterior totally impermeable.
When the futile ground survey was over Kallik raised her eyes again to scan the heavens far above the ship. She was no nearer finding Rebka and Lang, and—ominously—the Phages were no longer remaining at a safe distance. The presence of the Have-It-All, moving in its survey orbit around the planetoid, seemed to madden them. Three times Kallik had seen a Phage dropping in on a trajectory that carried it to within a couple of kilometers above the ship. Each approach came a little closer. Now she could see two more Phages, dropping in low.
She returned the Have-It-All to the surface of Glister, roughly where they had first found it, and went to her own quarters. The time for tentative measures was past. She selected equipment and carried it down from the ship to the surface. It would measure the E-M field associated with Glister and compute an external field to cancel it in magnitude and phase.
She sent a terse message to Opal, explaining what she was about to do. She could not signal to J'merlia, since Dreyfus-27 was still shielded by the mass of Gargantua.
Kallik dragged the field generator and inhibitor forty meters away from the Have-It-All. She had one more problem to solve. If she focused the field on the surface with a five- or ten-meter effective range, the device itself would sink through into Glister if the surface became fluid or gaseous. The only way to prevent that was to run a pair of lines attached to the generator right around the body of the sphere, one following a geodesic around the "equator" and the other a geodesic over the "poles." Downward forces would then be held by tension in the cables, and supported by the surface strength of the whole of Glister.
Kallik paused for thought.
The lines would be supported, unless of course the local field cancellation somehow caused a global cancellation. Then Glister would become a ball of gas or liquid, and Kallik, the Have-It-All, and the Summer Dreamboat would plunge together into the unknown interior.
A Hymenopt had no shoulders to shrug. Instead, Kallik clucked and chirped softly to herself while she made the final connections of the thin, dislocation-free cables to the field generator. She was a fatalist. So Glister might become liquid. Well, no one ever promised that life would be risk-free. She hurried back to the Have-It-All and left a message for J'merlia on the recorder of the ship, the equivalent of "So long, it's been nice knowing you." If she returned safely, she could erase it.
She turned on the power, stood back, and watched.
The result was at first disappointing. The generator was a compact device, operating with microwave energy beamed from the Have-It-All. There was nothing to show that it was in operation, and the equipment stood exactly as she had left it, with no sound or movement.
Then she heard it; a faint creaking of the thin, tight-strung cables, protesting as they took up the strain of the generator's weight. The unit itself stood on three solid legs, but now the bottom few centimeters of those legs were invisible. They had sunk through into the surface of Glister.
Kallik moved cautiously toward the field generator. Its position was stable, moving neither downward nor upward. She touched one of the taut support lines, estimating the tension. From the feel of it, the generator would have dropped right on through without them. The surface looked subtly different for a radius of about five meters from the field's center, where the support lines bent downward and disappeared.
Kallik reached down. Her forelimb penetrated the gray surface, but she felt nothing.
She had brought with her from the ship half-a-dozen spent power canisters. She lobbed one to land by the field generator. The surface did not change in appearance, but the metal canister vanished at once and without a trace. The absence of ripples around the point of disappearance argued for a gaseous rather than a liquid region around the generator.
Kallik retreated a couple of steps. So it would swallow a power canister easily, and perhaps a Hymenopt with no more difficulty. But was the canceled field zone deep enough to provide true access to the interior? Or did it come to a solid bottom, a few meters down?
Kallik knew that she would not find answers by standing and thinking about it.
She went back to the ship and procured another length of cable, securing it first to a brace on the Have-It-All's main hull and then cinching it around her own midriff. If someone came along and decided to fly the Have-It-All off on an interplanetary mission while Kallik was down inside Glister, she would be in deep trouble.
But she was in deep trouble anyway.
She moved to the edge of the zone of change. For a few seconds she paused there, hesitating. There was no guarantee that what she was doing would help Darya Lang and Hans Rebka—still less that it was the best way to help them. If there was a better solution, it was her duty to find it.
As she stood thinking there was a whoosh! of disturbed air not far overhead. It was a Phage, hurtling by no more than fifty meters from the surface. The dark maw was closed, but it could open in a few seconds.
Kallik whistled an invocation to Ressess-tress, the leading non-deity of the Hymenopts' official atheism. She blinked all her eyes, stepped forward, and dropped through into the impalpable surface of Glister.
CHAPTER 12
The Incomparable—incomparably rattly, rusty, cumbersome, and smelly—was approaching Gargantua. Birdie Kelly and Julius Graves focused their attention on the satellites and waited for a detailed view of Glister itself, while E. C. Tally stared steadily at a display of the giant planet. He had been sitting silently for fifteen hours, since the moment when the Incomparable's sensors had provided their first good look at Gargantua.
That was fine with Birdie Kelly. Tally's designers had recognized that the embodied computer's body would need rest, but apparently his inorganic brain functioned continuously. Over the past three days, Birdie had been wakened from sound sleep a dozen times with a touch and a polite "May I speak?"
Eventually Birdie had lost it. "Damn it, Tally. No more questions. Why don't you go and ask Graves something for a change? Julius and Steven between 'em know ten times as much as I do."
"No, Commissioner Kelly, that is not true." E. C. Tally shook his head, practicing the accepted human gesture for dissent and the conventional human pause before offering a reply. "They know much more than ten
times as much as you do. Perhaps one hundred times? Let me think about that."
The first sight of Gargantua had kept him quiet for a while. But now he was perking up and coming out of his reverie over by the display screens. To Birdie's relief, though, he was turning to Julius Graves.
"If I may speak: with respect to the communications that we have received from Darya Lang and from Kallik. Professor Lang suggests that Glister is a Builder artifact, and Kallik agrees. Does any other evidence suggest the presence of Builder activity in the vicinity of Gargantua?"
"No. The nearest artifact to Gargantua is the Umbilical, connecting Quake and Opal." The voice was Steven Graves's. "And it is the only one reported in the Mandel stellar system."
"Thank you. That is what my own data banks show, but I wondered if there might be inadequacies, as there have been in other areas." Tally reached out and tapped the screen, where Gargantua filled the screen. "Would you please examine this and offer your opinion?"
His index finger was squarely on an orange-and-umber spot below Gargantua's equator.
"The bright oval?" Graves asked. He looked for only a moment, then turned his attention to the other screen, where the sensors were set for analysis of a volume of space surrounding Glister. "I'm sorry. I have no information about that."
But to his own great amazement, Birdie did. He finally knew something that Graves did not! "It's called the Eye of Gargantua," he burst out. "It's a great big whirlpool of gases, a permanent hurricane about forty thousand kilometers across." He pointed to the screen. "You can even see the vortices on the image, trailing away from it on both sides."
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