The Spheres of Heaven tmp-2

by Charles Sheffield

  * * *

  Danny did his best. What he would really have liked was a long, strong drink immediately followed by a long, deep sleep, but he recognized his responsibility and tried to make sure that the others learned everything he had seen, heard, thought, and suspected during his day ashore.

  The Angel didn’t make his job any easier. Bony Rombelle and Liddy Morse had trundled it in on an improvised trolley, and either its desertion in the control room or the rough journey along the ship’s corridors was not to its liking. For the first few minutes, Gressel sat hunched as far down in the pot of earth as possible, fronds folded. And when the Angel finally began to open and take notice and even interrupt, there was a sideways jump to its logic that left Danny blinking.

  “At what exact local time of day was it when you emerged from the sea?” the Angel asked, as Danny was busy trying to give every detail of their arrival ashore.

  “I’m not sure. Why do you want to know?”

  “We wish to develop an exact chronology of all events affecting the shore party.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you to better than an hour.”

  “His suit will tell us,” Bony said. “The thermal balance would change as he came out of the water and into air, and that will be recorded against a time line.”

  “Look into it later.” Chan was impatient to move on to the meeting with the land aliens. “What next, Danny, after the group reached the shelter of the vegetation?”

  “We would like to have removed our suits, for comfort, but there were too many unfamiliar critters around. And we didn’t want to go crawling through the jungle for the same reason. A few of the Tinker components had already gone winging off over the top of the plants, and they all vanished. So we took the gadget that Bony made, and we gave it to Vow-of-Silence, and—”

  Danny wanted to describe what the Pipe-Rilla had seen through the periscope, but Gressel was in first. The Angel clapped top fronds together loudly to gain attention, and interrupted. “Exactly how many Tinker components flew away?”

  Another off-the-wall question. Danny was exhausted, he still didn’t have his drink, and he found it hard enough to provide a clear version of events without stupid interruptions. “How many components? I’m not sure. There were bits and pieces of Tinker coming and going all the time. What difference does it make?”

  “Perhaps none. Perhaps the number will prove of great significance.” The Angel sank down into silence.

  Danny waited, but apparently no more explanation was forthcoming.

  “The periscope,” Chan prompted.

  “It wasn’t long enough for anyone else to see over the ridge,” Danny went on. “But Vow-of-Silence was so tall, she could do it. Here’s what she saw — or said she saw. Remember now, none of the rest of us had anything to go on except what was told to us.”

  He summarized what he and the others hidden in the scrub had heard about the encampment, and the aliens, and the form wandering around free that looked like a human.

  “Looked to a Pipe-Rilla like a human,” Dag Korin said. “But damn it, do you think some gooky misfit lengths of animated drainpipe could look through a shaky handheld periscope, and be sure she was looking at a person a kilometer or more away?”

  The Angel stirred, but Danny could recognize a rhetorical question when he heard one.

  “We wanted to confirm what Vow-of-Silence had seen,” he said, “so we decided — after a bit of argument — that Chrissie and the Tarb should go take a closer look-see.”

  “What argument?” Dag Korin said. “I want to hear about that, too. Don’t decide for yourself that something isn’t important, and leave it out. Let’s hear the lot.”

  Danny sighed. Did they really want to know about the dark-red wriggly thing that he had found on the purple fern? Did they want to hear about Scruffy, and the hassle Deb had given Tarbush about taking the ferret with him? At some point he knew what they were going to say. Other than bugs and plants and soil, he hadn’t seen a single blessed thing. Everything that he knew about the encampment, about Friday Indigo, and about the mowing down of Chrissie and Tarbush had come to him secondhand as a report from either Deb or the Pipe-Rilla. They had seen and spoken, he had listened. He was a mere conveyor of hearsay.

  It was easiest to make no judgment, reorganize no facts, and simply offer a stream-of-consciousness version of events. Let the listener decide what was important.

  He described, through Vow-of-Silence’s eyes, the appearance of something that looked like a human which had apparently persuaded Chrissie and the Tarb to move forward when they ought to have retreated. The approach as far as the encampment’s guarding fence. The emergence of three dark-shelled and fast-moving shapes. The run for cover — the raised black canes — the fall, to lie motionless on the bare ground.

  And now, at last, something to which he could personally attest: the high-pitched, eerie moan that had emerged from Vow-of-Silence’s narrow head. The final dispersal of Eager Seeker into a great cloud of components, circling Danny and the rigid Pipe-Rilla like a tornado before flying off in all directions. And, five seconds later, Vow-of-Silence’s collapse forward at Danny’s side, into a fit or trance from which neither he nor Deb had been able to wake her.

  “I ask again.” the Angel interrupted Danny’s reliving of the moment. “How many components had Eager Seeker lost, in total, prior to this dispersal? Lost from every cause?”

  “Does it matter?” Dag Korin made no attempt to hide his irritation with Gressel. “What difference does it make if a hundred or a thousand Tinker components flew away?”

  Danny was glad to see somebody else fencing with the Angel. He no longer had the strength — he was so tired he could barely follow Gressel’s questions, never mind answer them.

  “It’s because of Tinker size and Tinker structure,” Chan said suddenly. “I remember it from twenty years ago, when I was working with a Tinker Composite on Travancore. I never saw the effect myself, but isn’t there some kind of Tinker stress/stability relation?”

  “There is indeed.” The Angel produced from its speech synthesizer a sigh very like a human’s. “As a Tinker Composite grows in size, it also grows in intelligence. That is well-known. What is less commonly known is that with increased intelligence comes greater sophistication in handling threats to a Tinker’s own safety. Unfortunately, the converse holds true. Reduce the number of components and the Composite decreases in stability. Now, as I understand it, Eager Seeker was originally an unusually large Composite. But soon after arrival on Limbo, a substantial fraction was detached to form Blessed Union, and went ashore.”

  “That’s what I was told,” Bony said, then felt embarrassed because he had butted in. He muttered, “But it never came back.”

  “And Eager Seeker went at that point from being a large to a somewhat small Composite. Yet more components were lost when the shore party was exploring. A reduced Composite, subjected to unexpected stresses at such a time, seeks safety using a mechanism ingrained through all of Tinker evolution: solitation.”

  “It flies apart,” Chan said softly. “Disperses.”

  “Worse than that. A Tinker can normally disperse at any time, and then reassemble. But a Tinker who suffers solitation will never come together again as an ensemble without assistance. The components eat, and they can still breed. But they form an uncoupled host of mindless and solitary components.” The Angel stirred, as though the sentient crystalline Singer within the vegetable of the Chassel-Rose imagined its own irrevocable separation of parts.

  “It’s death for the Composite,” Liddy said. She clutched Bony’s hand. “It may not sound like it, but it is.”

  “Which means that Deb is alone on shore.” Chan looked at Dag Korin. “She was waiting for Eager Seeker to come back, but it’s not going to happen. And while she waits there she’s a sitting target for whatever got Chrissie and Tarbush.”

  “No.” The General shook his head. “I know where you’re heading with your thinking, Dalton, but
I won’t allow it.”

  “I could go solo. Danny’s back, and the ship is safe.”

  “Not a chance. It would be crazy for you to try, at night and in unexplored terrain. Deb Bisson is a smart woman, too smart to do anything stupid. She won’t risk anything at night. She’ll lie low until morning. Then like as not she’ll decide that she can’t wait any longer for Eager Seeker, and head back here.”

  “I think I ought to go.”

  “And I’m pulling rank and telling you, for the last time, you’re not going. Get a grip, man.” Korin stood up, went to the metal bureau in the corner of the room, and opened the doors. “Casement wants a drink, and you should have one, too. We all should. Come on, Dalton, relax. We’re all here, and Deb Bisson is safe ashore. Not a damn thing is going to happen, here or there, until morning.”

  Korin picked up a bottle, opened it, and began to pour Santory single-malt whiskey into a line of small rounded glasses.

  As he did so, a loud buzzing drone rang through the whole ship. Once again it signaled for emergency action. Something, it said, was in the main airlock of the Hero’s Return.

  28: DEB’S DILEMMA

  Deb had listened to Chrissie and Tarbush’s logic for their being the advance scouts. She had been unable to refute it, but that didn’t mean she was happy with the situation.

  When they left, crawling cautiously away through the waist-high ground cover, her need to see , to know where they were and what was happening to them, grew stronger.

  Vow-of-Silence was lucky. She could look through the periscope. Eager Seeker was more fortunate yet. The Tinker could release inconspicuous individual components, each one able to fly high, examine the situation, and return to integrate its findings into the Composite. Deb and Danny alone were information starved. Even if Deb grabbed the periscope she was not tall enough to look over the top of the ridge.

  She stood it for about five minutes, during which Vow-of-Silence’s remarks were basically one comment repeated over and over: “There is no sign of them. They must be proceeding through the vegetation.” Finally she could take it no longer.

  She said to Danny, “Stay here and keep your eyes and ears open. I’m going to creep along to the ridge, and just take a peek over.”

  He raised his eyebrows, and his wrinkled face looked far from happy; but he nodded, and before he could offer any other reaction she was off, snaking into the brush along the line marked by Chrissie and Tarbush. She came to the band of lurid green that spanned the way ahead, with its assortment of dead and dying animals strung along it like beads on a necklace. She followed Chrissie’s lead in detouring to pass well clear.

  She was keeping her head well down and she sensed rather than saw when she crossed the brow of the ridge. Ahead of her, if Vow-of-Silence’s report was correct, the ground sloped down toward the encampment. Thirty yards in front of Deb the vegetation cover would end and be replaced by bare and sterile rock.

  That was as far as Chrissie and Tarbush were supposed to go. If Deb peeked out over the top of the plants she should be able to see them.

  She parted the ferny top growth as delicately as her suit gloves would permit, wrinkled her nose at the smell of lavender gone rotten, and slowly raised her head.

  And gasped.

  What were those two idiots playing at? They were far beyond the cover of the plants, walking toward the fenced encampment. Hadn’t they listened to one word of her orders?

  Then she saw the third one, way in front of them. It was a human male, and he was wearing the same kind of suit as Bony Rombelle. Friday Indigo, it had to be — there was no other candidate in this whole universe. Indigo was waving, and now Deb could tell that he was speaking though she couldn’t make out any words. Chrissie was talking back to him — and she and Tarbush were still walking, nearer and nearer to the fence around the alien camp.

  Deb wanted to shout a warning, but if she did that her own position would be revealed. She watched, gloved hand over her mouth, as Chrissie and Tarbush and Friday Indigo went on, to the gate in the fence and through it. At that point Tarbush and Chrissie stopped. Chrissie took a step backward. Friday Indigo raised his arm and pointed, toward the encampment and the buildings that bordered the airstrip.

  Deb saw three creatures, each as big as Tarbush — and he was a very big man. They had broad, blue-black carapaces, held almost level, and lots of legs. Deb didn’t have time to count them, because one pair of the aliens’ formidable front claws were lifting high. They held thick black sticks whose highly polished curved surfaces gleamed in the bright sunlight.

  Tarbush and Chrissie were moving, racing away from the fence and back across the bare rocky plain. They were almost at the edge of the dense plant cover when the air between them and the crouching aliens shimmered like a heat haze.

  Chrissie went down. Tarbush was already diving forward into the plants, but he fell a few feet short. Neither one moved as the armed aliens cautiously approached and bent over them. Friday Indigo stood as still as a statue, back by the fence. Deb did the same, hidden by the covering fringe of ferns. She heard a strange wailing cry from behind her. Danny, or Vow-of-Silence? Fortunately, the aliens took no notice. Two of them squatted down by folding their supporting legs — ten each, Deb counted — and easily lifted the unconscious humans.

  They headed for the encampment. The third alien lagged behind with its black cane still raised. As they passed through the fence, Friday Indigo moved at last. He followed them into one of the buildings, a windowless half-cylinder of dull yellow that seemed to crouch and merge into the black rock.

  Deb was desperate to do something. Vow-of-Silence and Eager Seeker did not know it, but she was far from weaponless. She had enough firepower concealed inside her suit to handle a dozen unfriendly aliens. But she was rational enough to know that attacking the building with Chrissie and Tarbush inside would be the worst possible thing to do. If they were dead, delay could not further harm them. If they were unconscious and had been taken as prisoners, an attack by Deb would be a sure way to put all their lives in greater danger.

  Even so, it took enormous self-control for Deb to retreat slowly and quietly through the thick scrub, over the line of the ridge and back to their own primitive camp. She did not like what she found there. Danny was bending over the knotted body of the Pipe-Rilla, and there was no sign of the Tinker Composite.

  He shrugged when she asked him. “Nowhere, everywhere. When Vow-of-Silence screamed, Eager Seeker came apart. It was like being in the middle of a hailstorm. I felt components banging into me and rattling off my suit just like they had no idea where they were or where they were going. Then Vow-of-Silence keeled over. She almost knocked me flat and landed just the way you see her now. I can’t wake her. And I’ve not seen a Tinker component since they all flew away.”

  Deb bent down at Danny’s side. The Pipe-Rilla’s long, gangly body had contorted until her head touched the end of her abdomen, and her slender jointed legs were tight-wrapped around the narrow body. Deb tugged at one, and it did not move a millimeter.

  “What happened over the other side of the ridge?” asked Danny. “What made Vow-of-Silence scream, and where are Chrissie and Tarbush?”

  “Captured. Unconscious. Maybe dead.”

  Deb gave a summary of what she had seen, making it as unemotional as possible. At the end, Danny simply nodded and said, “What do we do now?”

  It was a relief to have a team member able to understand the implications of a disaster without going hysterical. Deb glanced up at the sky.

  “Good question. We have maybe four more hours of light. I would say we ought to settle down here for the night, but we daren’t do that. I don’t think the aliens know where we are, but if they think at all like us they’ll assume that Chrissie and Tarbush didn’t come here alone. If they head our way, we’ll have to run. But this” — she pointed to Vow-of-Silence’s unconscious body — “will make a quiet escape impossible. And then there’s the Tinker. Eager Seeker’s components c
ould come back any time. So we ought to stay here, but I think that’s too risky.”

  Deb looked at Danny. He was small, but he was wiry. “Can you lift Vow-of-Silence?”

  “Lift her?” His face wrinkled in perplexity.

  “Can you pick her up? Can you carry her?”

  “Of course I can. In this low gravity, it’s dead easy.” To prove his point, Danny placed his arms around the tight ball of the Pipe-Rilla and lifted her to waist height. “See? No problem picking her up. Trouble is, if I have to run with her through the scrub I’m going to make a devil of a noise.”

  “I know. That’s why we have to do it now, and slowly, when nobody’s around to hear us. Come on.” Deb started to retrace their original path, back toward the sea. “If you get tired I’ll give you a hand.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “First, we’re going to the shore. Then you’re going back to the Hero’s Return with Vow-of-Silence, and you’ll tell the others what’s happening. I’m going to stay ashore for the night and wait for Eager Seeker.”

  Danny stopped dead. “Now wait a minute. You may be the shore team leader, but after what’s happened—”

  “Danny, ask yourself this. If it comes to a fight who’s better equipped for self-defense, Deb Bisson or Danny Casement?”

  “Well, you are. You’re a weapons master.”

  “I am. And at the moment there are no Stellar Group aliens around to tell me that violence is totally unacceptable. I’m telling you, if they’ve killed Chrissie and Tarbush …”

  The look on Deb’s face worried Danny, but he said, “Leaving you alone—”

  “ — Is the only rational thing to do.” Deb moved forward, heading again for the shore and the sea. Danny followed. When they were at the water’s edge, Deb took Vow-of-Silence’s body from him and closed the Pipe-Rilla’s suit visor.

  “Sure you can manage both of you underwater?” she asked. “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “I’ve got muscles you don’t even know about.” Danny smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll find the way.” He started to close his own suit, but paused. “There’s one other thing. They’re going to ask me what comes next. What should they be doing?”