/// So you can do this, yes? ///
/I can if you reach out and make the connection. You're my neurolink pathway./
/// That's no problem. ///
/And of course, if the factory head's language is even remotely comprehensible to me. I'll have to count on the stones, and maybe the robots, to sort that out./
"John?" L'Kell asked.
He blinked. "Yes. Yes, I might be able to make that connection—at least in principle. But—" he hesitated "—how the hell are you going to put me physically in contact with the thing? Do you have any ideas about that?"
L'Kell and Askelanda looked at each other.
"Don't even think about asking me to go out in the water at that depth. It would kill me."
"I expect it would," Askelanda rasped dryly. "It's not so healthy for us, either. We can do it, at need, but there are better ways to die."
Bandicut shivered.
"Could you use a cable connection similar to the one the robots used?" asked L'Kell.
Bandicut thought for a moment, then shook his head. "No, we don't have the interface."
/// Say, why couldn't you—? ///
Bandicut blinked, suddenly anticipating what the quarx was about to say. /Yes, of course! It might—/ He opened his mouth to speak, then thought, /But I don't even know how the damn thing works. Submarines, at least, I understand./ Nevertheless, he swallowed and said, "Our star-spanner bubble. I wonder if it might serve . . ."
L'Kell hissed. "The robots were well protected when we found them trapped down there in it. But how would that permit you to make contact?"
Bandicut described the way he and his companions had been able to stretch through the star-spanner bubble's membrane as though it were a rubber sheet. That had been in water much shallower than the depth of the factory, but perhaps it wasn't depth-dependent.
/// The stones think it might work.
It's worth a try, anyway. ///
The Neri listened to his description without comment. They were accustomed to membranes that did things Bandicut regarded as miraculous. Askelanda finally said, "I will ask, then, that you prepare to try this, when the time comes."
"When the time comes?"
"At the moment, it seems that your robots are doing all that can be done. It is best that you wait here until we receive word that the factory requires your presence."
"But—" Bandicut began, thinking how badly he wanted to get back down there and make contact, and put his hands on his robots. But he knew Askelanda was right.
Askelanda seemed to sense his thoughts. "John Bandicut, we have already asked more of you than any stranger—or visitor— should be asked to give. This might be our most dangerous request yet."
Bandicut frowned. "I guess we're not strangers anymore, are we? But it is absolutely necessary that this be done, yes?"
"Oh, yes," said Askelanda. "Without the factory—with the Maw threatening to destroy us, and I suppose the Astari too—who knows what would become of us?" Askelanda blinked his great, dusty eyes and readjusted his stole. "But John Bandicut, I must ask this: Why do these things matter to you? Why do you risk your life for us?" Askelanda cocked his head, gazing at him.
Bandicut's mouth opened, and froze. He struggled to find words.
"I've wondered, too," L'Kell said. "I have been happy to accept your actions, and your friendship, but—" The Neri's voice faltered, and his gaze seemed to furrow inward, as though he were listening to his own stones. Were they starting to give L'Kell hints of their purpose? Would they be any clearer with him than Bandicut's had been?
Bandicut let his breath out slowly. "I can't tell you, exactly," he said at last. "All I can say is, I guess when I find myself in a situation when I can do something to help—"
/// Or in a situation when you have to help— ///
/Yes./ He cleared his throat. "I—well, I try to."
"And," said L'Kell, eyes refocusing, "you are put by your stones . . . in the position of having to do these things, aren't you?"
Bandicut nodded uncomfortably. "But Askelanda—remember, too, I might be spending the rest of my life here under this sea with you." He swallowed hard. "I'm not acting completely selflessly. Even if you weren't my friends, I'd have reason to want your people to survive."
Askelanda gazed at him for a moment without speaking. Finally he cupped his hand-webs in a gesture of approval. "Then you'll abide by my wishes, and rest here and prepare properly? I do not want to lose you in vain—by sending you off too soon, or too tired to do what you have to do."
Bandicut drew a breath. "Yes." And he let the breath out, and wondered how in the world he could stand the wait.
Copernicus . . . Napoleon . . .
Interlude
Julie Stone
JULIE STONE CHECKED her suit monitors one last time, and stepped cautiously around the barricades that blocked off the inner cavern. The ice floor gleamed in her suit headlight. Ahead of her, the translator squirmed and twisted in its own faint radiance. "All systems normal," she murmured into her helmet comm.
"Telemetry looks good," said Georgia Patwell. Julie's friend's voice could have been coming from light-years away, or inches. She was stationed across the cavern floor, monitoring remote sensors and comm, ready to send in assistance if necessary. Realistically, of course, if the translator did anything that would require her to need help, what were any of them going to be able to do?
"Mass readings are unchanged," Julie reported. "I feel nothing unusual."
"No? Then why the hell is your heart pounding so loud I can hear it without the comm?"
Julie chuckled. "Just trying to keep you folks interested, is all."
The translator was a stark shape against the blue-white frozen nitrogen walls of the cavern. Its black and iridescent globes spun ceaselessly, like turbulent soap bubbles clustered together in the shape of a large top, passing through one another in endless motion, the whole array balanced upon a single black globe. Julie wondered if it had ever tipped over, and what would happen if it did.
Why had the translator ignored all efforts at communication by the exoarch and technology transfer teams? And why had it resisted being moved? One month and twenty million dollars worth of ruined equipment later, Julie Stone had been sent to find out.
So far it was showing no sign of noticing her presence.
"Okay, Jul'—Kim says you're cleared to approach the translator." Georgia's voice was calm but dead serious.
Making a conscious effort to breathe slowly and evenly, Julie stepped closer to the translator, until she could almost have reached out and touched the thing. She began to raise a hand but stopped, fearful. She knew what had happened to all those pieces of equipment, melted and vaporized. She stood gazing at the translator, thinking, Who are you really, and what are you doing here? Then she felt it tingling at the edges of her mind. Hello? she thought. Are you there?
*We are here.*
Startled, she cleared her throat, trying to quell a tremble that was beginning somewhere in the middle of her spine, and radiating outward. You are here. Where? In my head?
*Please focus your thoughts.*
Focus my thoughts? Julie hesitated, trying to decide what that meant. Then she recalled a neurolink technique that John had described to her once, and she frowned, trying to produce the kind of inward direction of her thoughts that people used in the neuro. /Is this what you mean?/ she asked silently.
*Better.*
She waited, wondering if the translator would say more.
Instead, it silently reached into her mind and began to blow her thoughts around, like a rising autumn wind stirring up dry leaves. Within moments, her mind was filled with a whirlwind of activity. She froze in place, bewildered, as the wind grew to a cyclone. She felt no pain. She teetered, but did not lose her balance, or consciousness. /What are you doing?/ she whispered. And it answered:
*Preparing.*
She blinked. /Yes . . . but preparing what?/
*Preparing to
give you . . . the tools that you will need.*
And then her consciousness did flicker, just for an instant, as if she'd nodded off and caught herself. And when she blinked back from it, she had the oddest sense that an array of glittering points of light had danced around her in the ghostly cavern, speaking to her, and then had vanished before she could ask them who or what they were.
*
"Jul', are you okay? Talk to me, hon'." Georgia was calling insistently—not in a panicky or distraught way, but over and over so as to get her attention.
"Huh? Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine," she murmured, stepping back a little from the translator. Wait a minute—wasn't she supposed to be approaching the thing? What had just happened here?
"What are you doing now, Julie? Tell us what you saw. Did you hear anything? Talk to me, Julie, talk to me."
"Uh, yeah. I . . . sensed it. I felt its presence. I know it was aware of me." She felt as if she had dozed off there for a second. That seemed impossible, with the adrenaline she had rushing through her veins.
"What, exactly, did you sense, Julie? Are you stepping away from it now? Keep talking. Don't drift out on me."
"What do you mean?" She shook her head. Something was happening in her mind; she couldn't quite tell what.
"Your heart-rate spiked, then took a big drop for a couple of seconds. Now it's climbing again. Did you lose consciousness?"
"I'm . . . not sure."
"Well, I think you did. And I think maybe you should come on out," Georgia said, her voice tinged with worry. "And I think you should tell me everything you remember, and everything that even crosses your mind, before you lose it."
"Okay."
"What happened when you first sensed it?"
Julie blinked hard. Looking at the translator she felt that there was some kind of impenetrable barrier between her and it now. It didn't want her to approach.
*Take time for acclimation,* said a voice, soft but deep in her mind.
"Okay," she murmured, half to the voice and half to Georgia. "It spoke. But it's not as if I understand exactly . . ." Her voice faltered. There was still a voice in her head. She thought she had broken contact with the translator. John had spoken in his letter of an alien intelligence that had somehow come to reside with him, in his mind. Was this one of those?
*We are not the quarx. There is only one quarx, and it lives with John.*
Lives with John? She blinked, wondering if she had heard that right. Lives? She shook her head. /If you are not a . . . quarx, then who are you? If you are not the translator . . ./
*We are the daughter-stones. We are of the translator.*
/Daughter-stones?/ She shook her head, peering out through her suit helmet at all the lights glaring off the translucent cavern walls, glaring in her eyes. Was she imagining all this? She felt a sudden slight sting, like an electrical tingle, in both of her wrists. She raised her gloved hands—and her arms, encased in the tough, insulated fabric of the pressure suit. For an instant, she had the illusion that she could look right through her suited arms and see her bare wrists—and what she saw, embedded in each wrist, was a pulsing bead of light. Daughter-stones . . .
The voice spoke again, as she drew a frightened breath.
*There is no need to fear us. There is much that we must tell you.*
/Tell me—?/
"Julie?" called Georgia. "Julie, keep talking, girl. Kim, I think you'd better get in there right away—"
*You must decide for yourself whether to trust us. But we have a journey to take together. And the first place we must travel is to your homeworld . . .*
Chapter 31
The Hardest Part
BANDICUT FOUND THE enforced waiting almost intolerable. When Antares asked him if he would like to accompany her to Kailan's lab, he readily agreed. He had spent the better part of two days resting, and didn't know how much longer he could stand to do nothing but stare out into the misty world of perpetual night. All of the reports were promising, but no more than that. The robots reported progress with the factory; S'Cali reported progress at the Astari wreck helping the sick there, repairing the damaged sub, and gathering materials for the factory. They were waiting for some supplies to arrive on an Astari surface craft. Everything added up to the fact that they were just going to have to keep waiting a while longer.
"How's Li-Jared doing?" Bandicut asked Antares, as they rode in the back of a small sub toward Kailan's habitat.
"He's grieving for Harding," Antares murmured, "and working very hard to keep from thinking about it. He didn't want to return to our quarters last night. I think he wanted to keep working all night."
"He is a passionate—" Bandicut almost said man, and instead said, "companion."
Antares placed a long-fingered hand on Bandicut's. "Yes," she said. "And he's someone who cares deeply about his friends." Antares was gazing at Bandicut with wide-pupiled eyes. "You might not have realized, because you were in such distress—but he gave his daughter-stones to Harding in no small part because he was afraid for you."
Bandicut's breath caught. Had he been aware of that? He hadn't thought about it much; but then, that episode was pretty blurred in his mind. But now he could almost feel Li-Jared's concern, and fear, and shame for being afraid—and his hope that perhaps he could do something.
/// Antares is replaying the emotions for you.
Or at least remembering them vividly. ///
He nodded slowly to Antares. "Do you think there's anything we can do for him?"
"I think, just staying with him is all we can do. I do not know his Karellian emotions well enough to do more than guess."
Antares blinked. "And you—you are worried for your robots, and maybe for everything that is to come. Please tell me if there is any way I can help you."
Bandicut caught her hand for a moment in his, and finally smiled gratefully.
The sub rumbled, turned, and approached Kailan's habitat.
*
Bandicut worked a long day with the others, without much success—trying to help Kailan uncover useful and relevant information about the Astari, about the factory, the Maw, anything they could find. They couldn't find much. It was not, Kailan was sure, that there was nothing there in the Neri records. But what they had was broken up, lost in a knowledge-base whose design was too confusing, and whose instructions and signposts had gotten lost in the passage of time, or with the appearance of the Maw.
Li-Jared determinedly kept at it, in the belief that anything they might find could be useful. That was Kailan's philosophy, too, and Bandicut agreed; it made good sense to try to learn all they could. But he was tiring; he couldn't keep his thoughts on what he was doing.
/// You've been here a long time.
Do you think maybe you should
take a break? ///
Bandicut sighed. /Maybe so./ Antares had gone off to take a walk a while ago, and Kailan was deep in conversation with Li-Jared. He rose from the console where he'd been crouching, stretched, and wandered out of the chamber.
He ended up in a big lounge where the Neri—mostly females here—liked to relax while eating and drinking, or playing with the young. But it was deserted at this hour; he was startled to realize how long they had been working. Almost everyone in the habitat was probably asleep. He walked to the window and peered out into the water where lamps illuminated a fish corral, apparently constructed of partial enclosures of netting, without any visible means of keeping the fish in. Several small schools of half-clear, half-silver fish were gathered in the enclosures, despite the fact that they could leave anytime.
"It's something about the currents, I think."
Bandicut glanced up, startled, to find Antares standing beside him. She pointed to the end of the nearest half-cage, where a slow current was carrying suspended debris, including bits of food, through the enclosure where the fish hovered. "They just seem to like it there."
Bandicut nodded silently. Now it was relaxing to be standing here, looking out int
o the emerald and white world of the artificially lit ocean. Two Neri swimmers came into view, tending the farm, and a solitary sub moved around like a somnolent fish with headlights, performing slow pirouettes in the night as it performed whatever maintenance chores it was out there for.
"There's a nice little dome room upstairs, where we can have some privacy, if you feel like sitting and talking." Antares held up a basket of fruit. "I just came from the storeroom. We could—how do you describe it?—have a picnic."
Bandicut stared at her, astounded by the thought of a picnic at the bottom of the sea. He began to laugh.
"Is this not a good idea?" Antares asked, with a Thespi grin of uncertainty.
"No, no—I mean, yes," he said. "It's a wonderful idea. Thank you." He grinned a human grin, then turned with a gesture and let her lead the way.
It was a small residence room, with a half dome looking out. "This is where I stay, when I don't return to the other habitat. Come sit." Antares pulled a large pillow to the center of the room, and he pulled another, and they sat with the basket between them, passing out food. There were small, yeasty nuggets that tasted like a bitter bread, and orange, waxy fruits shaped like pears, and twisted dried seaweed. They ate for a while in companionable silence.
After a time, Antares said, "Do you think we were sent to this world deliberately, to try to help these people? Could someone on Shipworld have known about the Neri's struggle with the Astari, and the Maw, and the broken factory?"
Bandicut eyed a nugget of bread-fruit, thinking of the normalization that made it possible for him to sit here under— what?—maybe twenty-five or thirty atmospheres of pressure, breathing uncertain gas mixtures, and eating alien plants that would probably kill him under other circumstances. "It's hard to see it any other way," he said. "I guess what I wonder isn't whether they sent us here deliberately, which I'm sure they did— whoever they are—but whether they intend to bring us back again. Or will we be spending the rest of our lives here on this world, under this ocean?"
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