“Do you think I don’t know that?”
“ — and I wouldn’t be here now, if I didn’t think you would want to hear what I have to say. All I’m asking is ten minutes.”
“In the middle of the night? After breaking into my home, disturbing my privacy, without even a call to tell me you’re coming.”
“If I had called ahead, would you have agreed to see me?”
She did not answer. The chain whistled through the air. One end passed close to Chan’s neck. Three inches more, and it would have severed his windpipe.
Call that encouraging. She could have killed him, and she’d decided not to.
“You wouldn’t have spoken to me, Deb. I think you would have regretted it later when you learned what you missed, but you’d have hung up on me. What I need to tell you isn’t personal. But it is private.”
The flicker of his eyes toward Deb’s naked companion would have been imperceptible to most people. Deb shrugged and tossed the chain casually to one side. She knew, and she knew Chan knew, that she could take him apart without any more weapons than her hands.
“Olaf, if you don’t mind.” She nodded to the man on the bed, who had wriggled back under a sheet. “I need to talk to this scumbag.”
Olaf stood up, turned his back to Chan, and pulled on his pants with as much dignity as he could manage. “Are you sure you’ll be safe?” he said over his shoulder. “I realize you know him, but if you would like me to stay and make sure you are all right …”
Deb’s smile was at Chan, and it was not friendly. “Thanks, Olaf, but I can manage. I wish he would start something, just to give me an excuse to snap his rotten neck.”
“Should I come back later, then?”
“We’ll see. I’ll call you.”
As Olaf left, Chan began, “If I had known that you had a regular partner these days, I wouldn’t—”
“Stuff it, Chan Dalton. You’ll have to lie better than that to fool me.”
“Was I lying?”
“You certainly were. Partner!” She spat the word at Chan like a curse. “I don’t have partners any more. How well do you think Olaf knows me, if he doesn’t realize I’m a weapons master who can look after herself better than anyone on Europa? He’s not my partner, he’s a pick-up — and a lot better lover than you ever were. So cut the crap. Tell me what you want.” She was reaching down to lift a white robe from the floor, and she saw Chan’s look. “And you can stop staring at my ass. You had your chance, and you blew it.”
“I was just marveling at how little you’ve changed. Your body doesn’t look a day older.”
“That’s nice. What am I supposed to do, curtsey and say thank you, sir? I’ll tell you one thing, I’m a thousand years older inside. So get on with it. What’s so important that you have to track me down and stick your nose into my life?”
Chan sat down on the bed. “It’s a long story.”
“You said you needed ten minutes.”
“If I had said I needed an hour, would you have agreed to listen to me?”
“Of course not.” Deb tucked her robe around her legs and sank easily to the floor. “You have ten minutes to prove I should waste an hour with you, and if you can’t you’ll be out on your ass. Nine minutes now — you’ve wasted one. Better get started.”
“We have a chance to put the old team together and take a ship to the stars.”
“Bullshit.” She glared up at him with angry brown eyes. “The Link network hasn’t worked for twenty years and it doesn’t work now. Are you trying to tell me that the Stellar Group is lifting the quarantine on us?”
“No. I’m telling you that they are allowing one ship with a human crew to use the network with their blessing. You can be on that ship, Deb.”
“I’d love to. Provided that you aren’t.”
“Sorry. It doesn’t work like that. The Stellar Group insists that I be there, because I worked with them before and they trust me.”
“More fool them.”
“They didn’t insist on anybody else. It was my idea to put the old team together. You, me, Dan Casement, Tully, the Bun, Tarb, Chrissie Winger … the way we planned it. Remember, Deb? The perfect team, with just the mix we needed. The idea wasn’t wrong, it’s as good now as it was then. It was the quarantine that stopped us.”
“The quarantine had nothing to do with what you did, you son of a bitch.”
“Maybe it did, Deb. Maybe it had a lot to do with it. But you said you didn’t want to talk about you and me, and I respect that. The new expedition isn’t about you and me. It’s about a chance to do what we once wanted to do, all of us, and never had the opportunity. It’s about a chance to end the quarantine and open the road to the stars. Forget that I’ll be on the ship. You won’t even have to talk to me if you don’t want to. Think of working with the others again. You and Tully the Rhymer always got on great with each other — the Tarbush, too.”
The angry twist to her mouth was less tight. She stood up, came across to where Chan was sitting on the bed, and stared down at him.
“You’re a wily bastard, Chan Dalton. You’re still trying to push my buttons. Do you really have the others lined up — all of them, Danny and the Tarbush and the Bun and everyone?”
Chan cursed his decision to visit Deb first. He could see the look in her eyes. It was the old star-lust, the way it had been twenty years ago. She was turning his way. If he could have just told her that Dan Casement and Tully were already definite, and Danny was even now on the Vulcan Nexus, chasing down the Bun …
“I don’t have everyone, Deb. I wish I did.”
“Who do you have?”
“Well, there’s me. And Danny Casement. And, I hope, you.”
“And that’s it ? You absolute asshole , you don’t have any team. You haven’t changed, not one little bit. You make promises, and when it’s time to deliver you just slip out from under. Get out of my sight.”
She crouched slightly and stood with her arms bent. Chan came to his feet in an eye-blink. You didn’t mess with Deb Bisson when she looked like that.
“Deb, I’m leaving. But if I could—”
“Out this minute, or I throw you out.”
Chan said rapidly, “Just ten seconds, for one more thing.”
“Nothing you can say will make any difference.”
“Maybe not, but let me say it. I’ll be going on this expedition with or without any others from the old team. I have to. But it won’t be the same, and it won’t be as safe. I came to you first, because if you come on board, I know for sure that Tully will, and the Tarbush will, and Chrissie will. They may not think much of me, but they worship you.”
“That is the worst crap I ever heard. I haven’t seen any of them for years. I don’t know where they are, what they’re doing, if they’re alive.”
“Now who’s the one who’s lying? Tully O’Toole lives right here on Europa, in the Mount Ararat settlement. You have to know that, Deb, this place isn’t big enough to hide somebody like Tully the Rhymer.”
“So what?”
“So come with me to see him. See how he reacts. If he says yes, it will be that much easier to talk to Chrissie and Tarbush.”
“Why should I make things easier for you?”
“It will only take one hour of your time.”
“One hour like your ten minutes?”
“If he says no, I’ll accept that I can’t get the old team together. I’ll be out of here.”
She stripped off the robe, turned, and walked across to a drawer set in the wall. “Do you know where Tully lives?” She was pulling out black pants and a tank top.
“I have a locator output.”
“And that’s all? I can do better than that. Tully’s on the northern knoll, and I know exactly where.”
“Are you proposing that we go there now? It’s the middle of the night.”
“That didn’t worry you when you broke in on me. Of course I want to go now. What’s the option? Sit here and listen to
you talk about the old times, and why you did what you did? No thanks.” She pulled a black hooded cloak over her skintight clothes and walked toward the door, smiling as if at some bitter joke. “You surprised me, it’s time you had a surprise yourself. We’ll go and see Tully. Then I think you’ll agree that the `old team’ idea is a load of garbage. You’ll be out of here. And I can forget that you ever came.”
11: THE ARRIVAL OF THE BUBBLE PEOPLE
Bony wanted to hurry without seeming to. The strange triple-winged craft had not reappeared, but it might at any moment and they were very visible out on the open rock. He didn’t want to frighten Liddy by telling her of possible danger that might never materialize, and the only other reason for haste that he could offer was the blue sun, sinking fast toward the horizon as they came within sight of the sea.
He pointed ahead. “See the way it seems to be dropping straight down toward the water? Dusk won’t last long here. We must have landed close to the equator of Limbo. Better hurry.”
He did not mention the other thing that puzzled him. The surface gravity of Limbo was low. That should mean that the planet was small, about the size of Earth’s Moon. But then the horizon should be close, as the planet curved away from them.
It wasn’t. His guess was that the horizon was as far away here as on Earth. What did it mean, if you had a planet the size of Earth with a gravity like that of the Moon? The obvious answer was that the density was small. How small? Bony couldn’t do the calculation in his head, but he vowed to pass it on to the ship’s computer when they got back on board.
His attention was on the setting sun, the sky which had turned from violet-blue to green, and the far-off horizon. It was Liddy, hurrying down the pebbled shore, who stopped abruptly and said, “What’s that ?”
She was pointing to their right, at ninety degrees to the sun. The arc of a dark circle loomed over the horizon. Bony felt the satisfaction of a question answered.
“It’s a moon. So Limbo has one — at least one.” Bony held his hand out at arm’s length, measuring the arc between his fingers. Everything looked big close to the horizon, but Bony estimated that if the full circle were visible it would stretch five degrees across the sky. Earth’s Moon was only a tenth of that. “It’s huge,” he went on, “or else it’s very close.”
They had stopped walking and stood about twenty meters from the placid sea. Bony felt divided urges — to watch the moon rise and study it, or to get safely back to the Mood Indigo .
While he was trying to make up his mind, Liddy spoke again. “If that’s a moon, shouldn’t it either be rising or setting? It’s not doing either. And it doesn’t look like a moon to me. I can see a funny sort of pattern on it. Can’t you?”
Now that it was pointed out to him, he could. The circular arc displayed a slow dilation and contraction, like the pupil of a vast eye. He could see moving color patterns, fringes of green and orange and yellow and blue. And Liddy was absolutely right; the object, whatever it was, was not moving relative to the horizon. But surely, if it had been there when first they left the ship and rose to the surface, they would have noticed it.
“Look below the water,” Liddy cried. “You can see it there, too.”
The circle didn’t end at the waterline. The same pattern of expansion and contraction, much fainter, showed underneath. As the sun dipped toward the horizon and the light became less intense, you could pick out part of the circle even under water. It seemed to have its own source of illumination. And right between the two, at the surface, a narrow band of steam or white smoke created a line of brightness. The line rippled and shimmered as though it was the site of intense turbulence, a furious mixing and blurring of air and water.
“What is it?” Liddy asked. And Bony — Mister Know-it-all himself, who prided himself on having answers for everything — couldn’t even offer a guess.
“I don’t know.” He made a decision. Despite its apparently peaceful appearance, Limbo had more potential dangers than he could imagine. “We can talk about what we’ve seen when we’re back inside the ship. Come on, Liddy. Suits closed.”
He led the way into the water, over-inflating the suit as he went to make sure that it would float. The unfamiliar cramped feeling around his belly and chest was proof that the pressure was increasing. He turned to Liddy, now an overstuffed roly-poly figure who nodded to him behind her visor. He turned on his suit thrustors at a low level, and side by side they coasted out to where the beacon still emitted its steady call.
As they went he became increasingly pleased that they had left the shore when they did. From this angle the sun was even lower in the sky. The sea was calm, but submerged in water up to his neck he found visibility increasingly difficult because of reflected glints on the surface. Without the directional radio feed from the beacon they would never make visual contact.
And then there was a new worry. Although the sea was calm he could feel the pull of a current. It was urging them in the direction of the rainbow eye.
“Can you feel that?”
“The current. Bony, it’s getting stronger.”
“I know. Angle your thrustors and give them higher power. Let air out of your suit. Don’t worry if we lose radio contact when we go under. We should be close enough now to see the ship. Look down as you go.”
No point in mentioning his own worry, that with the sun setting its light would no longer penetrate all the way to the seabed. Bony released excess air, switched the thrust of his suit to high level, and drove down into blue-green water. He could sense the pull of the current, weaker now, and he could make out the shape of Liddy’s suit a few meters ahead of him. He could not see any sign of the Mood Indigo .
Unexpectedly, Liddy veered off to the right. Her eyes were exceptionally sharp, he knew that. Maybe she had caught sight of the ship and was heading in that direction. In any case, he didn’t want to lose contact. Bony changed the angle of his own drive thrustors and dived to catch up.
He was looking for the ship, but what he finally saw was a faint blur of light. He swore at his own stupidity. Of course that’s what they would see, the ship’s internal lights shining out of the ports. Friday Indigo wouldn’t be sitting in darkness. The light became steadily brighter, and finally Bony could make out its source, the bulbous, bottom-heavy shape sitting quietly on the sea floor. He had never in his life expected to be so pleased at the prospect of Friday Indigo’s company. He came up behind Liddy and watched as she went under the airlock and up to its open hatch. He took half a minute more, reeling in the surface beacon and its connecting line. He had already worried that it might have been noticed by whatever or whoever flew that strange tri-lobe aircraft through the air of Limbo. Then he joined Liddy, heaved himself into the lock, and sat panting on the edge of the hatch. It was good to be there, but he wouldn’t feel fully safe until the lock had cycled and he was once more inside the ship with both outer and inner hatches closed.
Friday Indigo was waiting for them as they emerged into the cabin of the ship — but he didn’t wait long. Bony could tell that the captain was angry or nervous because his mouth was twitching. Bony hardly had his helmet open before Friday Indigo was in his face, shouting, “For God’s sake, Rombelle, do you realize how long you’ve been gone? Hours and hours, without one damned signal back to me. You’d better have an explanation. And it had better be a lot more than you were just farting around on the surface up there.”
“It was.” Bony felt energy going out of him, like the extra air bleeding out of his suit. With his helmet still on his head and the body unit of his suit unopened he flopped down onto a drive housing. “I’m going to tell you what we saw. I’m not going to try to explain it.”
“You’ll do what I tell you to do. I don’t pay you to be a robot or a parrot.”
“I don’t trust my own judgment, sir, that’s why I don’t want to guess at explanations. I’ve been wrong about so many things about this planet. I’ll give you an example. We found land.”
“
That’s great!”
“I thought so — at first. It’s just a few kilometers from here, bare black rock with no sign of life. So I concluded there must be no land life, that plants and animals hadn’t emerged from the sea yet. Then we saw something flying, and I decided that I’d been wrong. I couldn’t imagine a flying form emerging directly from a sea-life form.”
“Then you weren’t thinking straight. Haven’t you heard of flying fish?”
“I thought of that — later. But it didn’t matter, because this was nothing like a fish, and we realized that it wasn’t a bird or an animal, either. It was some kind of aircraft. But it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“God damn it!” Indigo’s dark brows lowered into a frown and he thumped the cabin wall with his open palm. “That’s terrible news. It means we don’t have this place to ourselves. We’ve been beaten to it. One of the Stellar Group expeditions came through alive.”
“I’d love to think you’re right, sir, but I don’t believe you are. The flying machine wasn’t like any aircraft or spacecraft in the solar system, but it also wasn’t like anything else I ever saw or heard of. Like nothing inside the whole Perimeter.”
To Bony, that was bad news. Friday Indigo obviously didn’t agree. He was grinning hugely. “If you’re right, we’ve got it made. Can’t you see it? A new planet, a new intelligent species, new technology like nothing you’ve ever seen. And nobody but us knows a thing about it! We’ll go up there, talk to whoever runs the flying machine — this ship has the best universal translator that you can buy — and go home with a negotiation position you wouldn’t believe.”
“If we can get home. That’s another thing. There may be a way. As we were coming back, Liddy and I saw something that we feel sure wasn’t there when we left the sea to take a look ashore.”
As Bony stripped off his suit he described the rainbow-hued arc. It was difficult to find words for something so unfamiliar, the partial circle with its darker and poorly defined extension under the water.
The Spheres of Heaven tmp-2 Page 13
