The Spheres of Heaven tmp-2

by Charles Sheffield

  “When we saw it,” he said, “I couldn’t think what it might be. But as I sat puffing and panting on the lock hatch, I had an idea. The thing looks like a circle, but actually it must be a spherical region. I believe that it’s a Link access point — the same one we came through to get here.”

  “Nonsense.” Friday Indigo glared at Bony. “You can’t possibly have a Link access point in water.”

  “We’ve never seen one before, I know that. But we did get here somehow, and we have no other candidates. If this is one, it isn’t open always. It wasn’t there earlier today. But if it’s a Link access point and we can get the Mood into the right place at the right time, we can go home.”

  “Go home?!” Indigo was infuriated. “You talk of going home — when we haven’t done a single thing that we came here to do. I want to find out all about this planet! I want to know everything here that’s valuable! You saw just a tiny bit, as much as you could walk to in a couple of hours, and already you talk of leaving! Well, forget that idea. It’s too late tonight, but tomorrow when it’s light we’ll head outside again and make another trip to land. This time we’ll be better organized, and we’ll take plenty of instruments. And before we’re done with this damned place, I’ll know it inside out. I’m going to find that flying vehicle you saw. I’m going to take a close-up look at it. Maybe I’ll even take it back with me.” Indigo was stamping up and down the cabin. “Rombelle, you’re a fool. You just don’t get it. This place, Limbo or whatever you want to call it, is opportunity .”

  Bony stared at the captain. It was the recklessness of ignorance, the confidence of a man who had always been able to buy himself out of trouble. How did you persuade a rich idiot like Friday Indigo that the biggest opportunity a new world offered was often the chance to be killed in unpleasant ways?

  “It’s not just the land area,” Liddy said quietly, before Bony could find a tactful way of phrasing what was on his mind.

  It was the first time she had spoken since she and Bony had entered the ship, and Indigo at once made a dismissive gesture of his hand. “Keep out of this. You weren’t brought along on this trip to think, so shut up.”

  “I feel sure you’ll want to hear this, Friday.”

  “It had better be good, girl, or you’re in real trouble.”

  “I don’t know if it’s good or not; but it’s important.” Liddy turned to Bony. “When we left the surface and dived underwater to look for the ship, did you see anything unusual?”

  Bony had seen very little. The swirl of blue-green past his visor, a stream of air bubbles from Liddy’s suit. He shook his head.

  “Well, I did.” She paused, and this time Friday Indigo waited. “We were diving, but I wasn’t sure where the Mood might be, so I was trying to keep an eye open in all directions. Then I saw a light under the water. For a moment I felt sure that it came from this ship — I mean, what else could it be? — and I was ready to turn in that direction. But it didn’t look right. It wasn’t just a light or two, like our lights shining through the ports. It was more like a column of lights, strung out in a straight line. It seemed like they pointed at something. I followed the line of them with my eye. I saw the lights of the Mood Indigo, and then the ship itself sitting on the seabed. And I turned to head in this direction, and Bony and I came aboard.”

  Indigo was silent for a moment, then he said to Bony, “Rombelle, did you see any of this?”

  “Nothing.” And, at Friday Indigo’s contemptuous snort, “But I don’t see nearly as well as Liddy, under water or above it.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Indigo said grudgingly. “She’s got great eyesight, I’ll grant you that. But a line of lights, under water? Give me a break.”

  Bony turned again to Liddy. “Can you tell us where the thing you saw was, relative to where we are now?”

  “I think it was in that direction.” She pointed to one side of the cabin. The three of them went to the port and crowded around it.

  “Do you see anything?” Indigo asked. “I don’t.”

  “Nor do I.” Bony turned to Liddy. “How about you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So you imagined things,” Friday Indigo said. “I warned you not to waste our time. Don’t try thinking, Liddy, it doesn’t suit you. I brought you along for your body, not your brains.”

  “Now you wait a minute.” Bony felt his head ready to explode. He was going to hit Indigo unless he could find a distraction. “There might be something there. It’s difficult to see outside when the cabin lights are on. Suppose we turn them off.”

  “Suppose we do. We’ll still see nothing.” But Indigo went across to the console, and a moment later the cabin lights dimmed.

  “Just as I expected,” Indigo said in the darkness. “Pure imagination. You and your damn lights, Liddy. You didn’t see …” His voice faded.

  The sun had set, and its light no longer diffused down from above. The Mood Indigo sat in a silent, stygian gloom. But far away, so faint that one moment it seemed to be there and in the next the eye had lost it, a tiny splinter of light shone wanly through the green water.

  “There it is,” Bony said breathlessly. “Liddy, you said you saw a column of lights.”

  “That’s what it looked like from above. But they were all pointing in this direction, so from here they line up. I can still make out about a dozen of them, only not so clearly.”

  They were silent for a long time, peering into darkness, until Liddy added, “I can’t be sure. But I think they’re moving. Yes, they are.”

  Bony stared until his eyes felt ready to pop out of his skull. It was no good. To him, it was still a single blur of light. Indigo must have been in the same situation, because he said quietly and without skepticism, “Moving how, Liddy?”

  “Moving this way. Look, can’t you see that one of them is slightly ahead of the others?”

  Liddy must have eyes like an eagle. Bony couldn’t see any such thing. But then, suddenly, he could. The single line of light resolved itself into separate points. He tried to count them, but lost track when he reached ten. The splinter of light had at first been blue-green, now its separate points shone with a yellower glow. And each point was slowly brightening. Was it his imagination, or were they also moving up and down?

  “They’re coming this way,” said Liddy. Her voice was calm, but Bony felt her hand take his in the darkness and grip it hard. “I wasn’t sure before, but now I am. They seemed to point toward the ship when I first saw them, because they were moving in single file. And they still are.”

  “You’re right.” Indigo sounded anything but calm. “I can see them, too. If they keep up that speed they’ll be here in another few minutes. Thank God I installed weapons on the ship, just in case. Rombelle—”

  “We’re under water, sir. Fire weapons in our situation, and we’ll be more likely to blow ourselves up than anything else.”

  “Well, we have to do something. If we’re attacked we can’t just sit here.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry too much.” Bony offered that reassurance more for Liddy’s benefit than because he believed it. He went on, “Remember, these are sea-creatures. Even if they are intelligent, they won’t know about fire or have the technology to develop explosives or projectile weapons.”

  Bony didn’t fully believe what he said. Nor, judging from the grunt from the darkness, did Friday Indigo, but there was a certain perverse pleasure in quoting the other man’s own words back to him.

  “The lights are being carried,” Liddy said suddenly. “They are some sort of oblong balls, all filled with light.”

  “Bioluminescent,” Bony added. To him they were still shapeless blobs. “That’s what you would expect in marine organisms, some form of phosphorescence or bioluminescence. You wouldn’t expect ordinary combustion.”

  “Stuff your combustion.” Indigo sounded frantic. “I don’t want idiot science lectures. Carried by what , Liddy?”

  “I can’t tell yet. But in another minute
or two we can get a closer look—”

  “The scopes!” Bony shouted the words, while he groaned inside at his own mental inadequacy. He had been peering hopelessly and unthinkingly into the darkness like Neanderthal man trying to see outside his cave, while the Mood’s sophisticated imaging sensors and image intensifiers sat unused beside him. He fumbled his way to the console, turned on an internal light, and pulled up a display connected to the scopes. A few of them would certainly not work — thermal infrared sensors relied on radiation, not physical contact with the sensors — but visible wavelengths should be fine.

  Another half minute when he seemed to be all thumbs, and then he had it. The screen showed a patch of lights at its center. He zoomed in.

  And there they were. He had half known it, even before he thought of using the scopes. Fourteen bubble creatures — now he could count them, easily — were drifting toward the ship along the seabed. Each one floated in front of it a giant light, pear-shaped but the size of a watermelon. With that illumination Bony could make out every detail of their bodies.

  The ball-like heads sat on rounded iridescent trunks that quivered when the creatures moved, as though the whole animal was boneless and made of soft jelly. Nothing in the head resembled a nose or mouth, unless it was the wide horizontal slit that sat close to the top of the rounded body. Above the head, connected to it by a pair of delicate-looking fringed stalks or antennae, hovered two green spheres that were probably eyes. If so they were separately controlled, turning independently and apparently randomly to point in different directions. The watermelon-pear light was carried easily by four string-of-bubble arms or tentacles, and four more waving limbs attached to the bottom of the globular body carried it easily over the uneven ocean floor.

  The whole added up to such an appearance of fragility and vulnerability that Bony felt reassured. The creatures shown by the scope seemed as soft and harmless as children’s toys. But so, he reminded himself, did a Portuguese man-of-war, with its agonizing sting.

  Liddy Morse and Friday Indigo had moved away from the port to stand next to Bony, staring at the display.

  “Son of a bitch,” Indigo said softly. “They’re real. You didn’t make them up after all.”

  “They’re real all right.” Bony had the computer hooked in to the scope circuit, analyzing the movement of the creatures on the display. He glanced at its output. “Real, heading right for us, and unless they decide to stop they’ll be here in seven minutes.”

  “What do we do?”

  Apparently Indigo had decided that Bony, science lectures and all, was not such an idiot. Bony thought for a moment. “If they’re as soft as they look, there’s no way that they can damage the hull. But I’ve been wrong so often today I wouldn’t put money on it. I suppose we could all put space-suits on. But I doubt if it’s worth it. If they can break into the hull, the suits won’t hold them for a minute.”

  Indigo nodded. “No suits, then. So what do we do?”

  The same question again, and a very reasonable one. But Bony was out of ideas. He had been exhausted, even before he and Liddy arrived back aboard the ship. Now he felt giddy with fatigue, and his brain had already gone on strike. “I guess” — he looked apologetically at the other two — “I guess we wait.”

  * * *

  Seven minutes.

  The sea-creatures steadily came closer. The tension in the cabin grew until it was thick enough to choke them. No one had anything to say.

  Six and a half minutes.

  Bony decided that seven minutes would hardly feel longer if you were being operated on without anesthetics by a sadistic torturer. Purely for something to do, he asked the ship’s computer what a planet would be like if it had the same gravity as Earth’s moon and was the size of Earth. It asked him a bunch of foolish questions about density distributions, none of which he could answer. He told it to make any default assumptions it liked, and stop bothering him.

  The answer came quickly, but it was not very informative. If a world had the same size and internal mass distribution as the Earth, then if its surface gravity was equal to the Moon’s mean surface gravity, its average density would be 0.91.

  Less than one. According to the computer, the average density was less than that of ordinary water. But the whole ocean of Limbo was salty heavy water, with a density fifteen percent more than ordinary water. There was no way that Limbo ought to possess an ocean at all. At that planetary density, all liquid water should have sunk below the surface.

  Bony stared at the offending number. Nothing about Limbo made sense. The ridiculously low density. The heavy-water sea. The blue giant star, too young to allow life to develop on a planet around it. The Link access point, in water where no Link access could be. And if there were such a Link point, how had they been able to transfer to it when the ship’s automatic protection system forbade transfer with substantial matter present? Limbo simply became stranger and stranger with every passing hour.

  But maybe it was about to get stranger yet. In the darkened cabin, Liddy said softly, “They’re here.”

  It was not necessary to use the imaging sensors and the enhancers to know that. They could see light shining in through the ports. The ring of sensors on the Mood Indigo stood about four meters above the seabed, and they gave an excellent view of the scene below. Fourteen bubble-creatures, each with its light, had drifted to surround the ship in a rough circle. As Bony watched, one of them left the circle and floated in toward the base of the vessel, beyond the imaged area. A soft thump vibrated through the hull. It sounded more exploratory than violent, but Indigo said nervously, “They’re attacking the ship. What do we do now?”

  “That doesn’t seem like an attack. No, don’t!” Bony spoke to Liddy, who was about to go over to the port. “Stay here, where we can see them with the image system and they can’t see us. I don’t think they have good night vision, because they’re carrying lights. But if you get close to the port they may see reflected light from your face. Keep your voice down, too. If they can’t see or hear us they may go away.”

  “It’s back in the circle,” Indigo said. “The one who banged on the ship, I mean. They’re all there now. Uh-oh. What are they doing?”

  The giant glowing pear-shapes were dimmer, and the scene provided by the ship’s imaging sensors was fading steadily to a uniform gray.

  “I don’t know how they’re doing it, but the lights they’re carrying are going out.” Bony clicked the image sensitivity range to a different setting, and the scene outside again became visible, now in black and white. “Look at them. They seem to be settling down. I think the Limbics are going to sleep.”

  “The who?” Friday Indigo stared. “Where the hell did you get that from?”

  “We need a name for them, and they live on Limbo. I think they’re probably intelligent, seeing how they use portable lights to see at night.”

  The creatures no longer stood above the seabed on their bubble strings of tentacles. Instead, the rounded end of the body had settled comfortably down onto the sea floor, where the array of pikes had been crumbled to dust by the arrival of the Mood Indigo. At the upper end of the body, the antennae with their green sphere eyes drooped down to sit on each side of the soap-bubble head. Each had placed its light neatly on the sea floor, with the wide end of the pear facing down.

  The humans in the cabin sat in frozen silence, watching and waiting for what felt like forever.

  At last Liddy said, in a whisper, “If they’re going to do nothing, why did they come?”

  “I have no idea,” Bony replied just as softly. “But I suspect we’re not going to find out tonight. Maybe they think that we’re asleep. Animals without technology follow the same schedule as the sun.”

  “Do you really believe they’ll stay quiet until morning?” Indigo had sagged slowly back in his chair as the immediate danger seemed less.

  “It looks like it. They’re not moving.”

  “Then I’m going.” Indigo came to his feet, qu
ietly but with determination. “To my own cabin. No, Liddy” — she had been sitting with her head bowed, but lifted it as he stood up — “not tonight. It’s been a tough day. Tonight I need peace and quiet, not company. You stay here with Rombelle and keep watch. And you, Rombelle, none of your damned banging and hammering. You won’t wake me, because I’m putting a wave feedback unit on as soon as I get up there. But if those Limbic things of yours are asleep outside, let’s keep it that way.”

  Indigo went across to the ladder, carrying with him the tiny portable light that now provided the only illumination for the cabin. In the final glimmer before Indigo and the light disappeared, Liddy glared — not at Indigo, but at Bony. As soon as the captain was on the upper level and out of hearing, she whispered, “Why do you let him treat you like that?”

  “Who?”

  Bony realized it was not a very intelligent question, given that Indigo was probably the only human male within a hundred lightyears. But before he could say more, Liddy burst out, “You’re much smarter than he is. You do all his work, and all his thinking.”

  “Not so loud!”

  Her voice had been rising in pitch, and when she spoke again it was shriller than ever. “Who explored the seabed outside the ship, and the surface of the water, and the land? Who may have found the Link? Not Friday Indigo. You did it all. But he treats you like dirt — and you let him, with never a word of complaint. He tells you he had a hard day, he needs to rest — when he hasn’t done a thing. And you don’t utter one peep.”

  The injustice of it had Bony speechless — almost. “Me!” He heard his voice squeak with outrage. “You think he treats me badly? What about you? It burns me up, the way he talks to you. How do you feel when he says, `I brought you along for your body, not your brains’? How dare he say that? The nerve of the man!”

  “What’s wrong with my body?”

  “Nothing.” Bony wished there were enough light to see her facial expression. Was that anger, or insecurity? “I think your body is perfect.”

  “So you’re agreeing with what he did. He didn’t buy me for my brains. He bought me for my body.”