Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  He was going to tell it all! Everything! All the facts that the whole party had agreed must remain dead secret until a high-level approval to discuss them had been granted. Darya tried to kick Rebka's leg under the table and hit nothing but empty air.

  "We found a small group of Zardalu—" He was grinding on.

  "You mean, you found people from the territory of the Zardalu Communion?" Glenna Omar was smiling with delight. Darya was sure that she thought Rebka was making up the whole thing for her benefit.

  "No. I mean what I said. We found Zardalu, the original land-cephalopods."

  "But they've been extinct for ten thousand years!"

  "Most have. But we found fourteen living ones—"

  "Eleven thousand years." Merada's high-pitched voice from the end of the table told Darya that everyone in the dining room was listening.

  Bang went a lifetime's reputation for serious and sober research work! Darya kicked again at Rebka's leg under the table, only to be rewarded with a pained and outraged cry from Glenna Omar.

  "Or rather more than eleven thousand," Merada went on. "As nearly as I can judge, it has been eleven thousand four hundred and—"

  "—Zardalu who had been held in a stasis field since the time of the Great Rising, when the rest of the species were killed off. But the ones we met were very much alive, and nasty—"

  "But this is disgraceful!" Carmina Gold had awakened from her dormouse trance and was scowling down the table at Darya. "You must know of the fearsome reputation of the Zardalu—"

  "Not just the reputation." Darya gave up the attempt to stay out of it. "I know them from personal experience. They're worse than their reputation."

  "—we managed to send them back to the spiral arm." Rebka had his hand on Glenna Omar's elbow and seemed to be ignoring the uproar rising from all parts of the long table. "And later we returned from Serenity ourselves, except for a Cecropian, Atvar H'sial, and an augmented Karelian human from the Zardalu Communion, Louis Nenda, who remained there to—"

  "—a dating based on admittedly incomplete, subjective, and unreliable reference sources," Merada said loudly, "such as Hymenopt race memories, and the files of—"

  "—living Zardalu should certainly have been reported to the Alliance Council!" Carmina Gold was standing up. "At once. I will do it now, even if you will not."

  "We already did that!" Darya stood up, too. Everyone seemed to be saying "Zardalu!" at once, and the group sounded like a swarm of angry bees. She did not think Carmina Gold could even hear her. "What do you think that Captain Rebka was doing on Miranda before he came here?" she shouted along the table. "Sunbathing?"

  "—about four meters tall." Rebka had his head close to Glenna Omar's. "An adult specimen, standing erect, with a midnight-blue torso supported on thick blue tentacles—"

  "—living Zardalu—"

  "My God!" Merada's piercing tenor cut through the hubbub. His worries over the dating of Zardalu extinctions had apparently been replaced by a much more urgent one. He turned to Darya. "Wild Phages, and an Alliance councilor, and an embodied computer. Professor Lang, those entries for the fifth edition of the catalog, the ones for which you promised to provide the references. Are you telling me that the only reference sources you will offer me are—"

  There was a loud crash. Carmina Gold, hurrying out of the dining room but turning to glare back at Darya, had collided with a squat robot carrying a big tureen of hot soup. Scalding liquid jetted across the room and splashed onto the back of Glenna Omar's graceful bare neck. She screamed like a mortally wounded pig.

  Darya sat down again and closed her eyes. With or without soup, it was unlikely to be one of the Institute's most relaxing dinners.

  "I thought I handled things rather well." Hans Rebka was lying flat on the thick carpet in the living room of Darya's private quarters. He claimed that it was softer than his bed on Teufel. "You have to understand, Darya, I said all those things about the Builders and the Zardalu on purpose."

  "I'm sure you did—after we all agreed to reveal absolutely nothing to anyone about them! You agreed to it, yourself."

  "I did. Graves proposed it, but we all agreed we should keep everything to ourselves until the formal briefing to the Council. The last thing we wanted was to throw the spiral arm into a panic because there are live Zardalu on the loose."

  "And panic is just what you started at dinner. Why did you all of a sudden do the exact opposite of what we said we'd do?"

  "I told you, the briefing to the Council was an absolute fiasco. We need to get people worked up about the Zardalu now. Not one Council member would believe a word of what we had to say!"

  "But Julius Graves is a Council member—he's one of them, an insider."

  "He is, and yet he isn't. He was elected one of them, but of course his interior mnemonic twin, Steven Graves, as someone pointed out early in the hearing, was never elected to anything. No one expected a simple memory extension device to develop self-awareness, and that happened after Julius was elected to the Council. The integration of the personalities of Julius and Steven seems to be complete now—the composite calls himself Julian, and gets upset if you forget and still call him Julius or Steven. But there were more than a few hints by other councilors that the development of Steven had sent Julius off his head while the integration was going on. You can see their point: although councilors do not lie or fabricate events, Julian Graves is not, and never was, a councilor."

  "But what about E.C. Tally? A computer, even an embodied computer, can't lie. He should have had more to say than anyone—his original body was torn to bits by the Zardalu."

  "Try and prove that, when you don't have one tangible scrap of evidence that all the Zardalu didn't become extinct eleven thousand years ago, and stay extinct. A computer can't lie, true enough—but it can sure as hell be reprogrammed with a false set of memories."

  "Why would anyone want to do that?"

  "That's not the Council's worry. And old E.C. didn't help his case at all. Halfway through his testimony he started to lecture the Council about the inadequacies of the Fourth Alliance central data banks, and the nonsense that had been pumped into him from those banks about the other clades of the spiral arm before he was sent to the Phemus Circle. The Council data specialist interrupted E.C. to say that was ridiculous, her data banks contained nothing but accurate data. She insisted on doing a high-level correlation between E.C.'s brain and what's in the central banks. That's what convinced the Council that Tally's brain had been tampered with. His memory bank shows that Cecropians believe themselves superior to humans and all other species, and that a Lo'tfian interpreter for a Cecropian can when necessary operate quite independently of his Cecropian dominatrix. It shows that Hymenopts are intelligent too—probably more intelligent than humans. It shows that there exist sentient Builder constructs, millions of years old but able to communicate with humans. It shows that instantaneous travel is possible, even without the use of the Bose Network."

  "But that's true—we did it, when we traveled to Serenity. It's all true. Every one of the statements you just made is accurate!"

  "Not according to your great and wonderful Alliance Council." Rebka's voice was bitter. "According to them, Serenity doesn't even exist, because it's not in their data banks. The information there is holy writ, something you just don't argue with, and what's not there isn't knowledge. It's the same problem I've suffered all my life: somebody a hundred or a thousand light-years from the problem thinks they can have better facts than the workers on the spot. But they can't, and they don't."

  "But didn't you say all that to them?"

  "Me say it? Who am I? According to the Alliance Council, I'm a nobody, from a nowhere little region called the Phemus Circle, not big or important enough to have clout with either the human or the interspecies Council. They took less notice of me than they did of E.C. Tally. I began to describe the Zardalu's physical strength, and their phenomenal breeding rate. Do you know what they said? They explained to me
that the Zardalu are long-extinct, because if that were not the case, then certainly their presence would have been reported somewhere, in the Fourth Alliance, or the Cecropian Federation, or the Zardalu Communion. Then they mentioned that the Fourth Alliance has evolved techniques unknown in the Phemus Circle 'for dealing with mental disorders,' and if I behaved myself they might be able to arrange for some kind of treatment. That's when Graves lost his temper."

  "I can't believe it. He never loses his temper—he doesn't know how to."

  "He does now. Julian Graves is different from Julius or Steven. He told the Council that they are a bunch of irresponsible apes—Senior Councilor Knudsen does look just like a gorilla, I noticed that myself—who are too closed-minded to recognize a danger to the spiral arm when it's staring them in the face. And then he quit."

  "He left the Chamber?"

  "No. He resigned from the Council—something no one has ever done before. He told them that the next time they saw him, he would make them all eat their words. And then he left the Chamber, and took E.C. Tally with him."

  "Where did he go?"

  "He hasn't gone anywhere—yet. But he's going to, as soon as he can get his hands on a ship and recruit the crew he needs. Meanwhile, he's going to tell anyone who will listen about the Zardalu, and about how dangerous they are. And then he's going to look for the Zardalu. He and E.C. Tally feel sure that if the Zardalu came back anywhere in the spiral arm, they will have tried to return to their cladeworld, Genizee."

  "But no one has any idea where Genizee is. The location was lost in the Great Rising."

  "So we're going to have to look for it."

  "We? You mean that you'll be going with Graves and E.C. Tally?"

  "Yes." Rebka sat upright. "I'm going. In fact, I'll have to leave in just a few hours. I want to make the Council eat their words as much as Graves does. But more than that, I don't want the Zardalu to breed themselves back to power. I don't frighten easily, but they scare me. If they're anywhere in the spiral arm, I want to find them."

  Darya stood up abruptly and moved across to the open window. "So you're leaving." It was a warm, breezy night, and the sound of rustling palm leaves blurred the hurt in her words. "You travel four days and nine light-years to get here, you've been with me only a couple of hours, and already you want to say good-bye."

  "If that's all I can say." Hans Rebka had risen quietly to his feet and moved silently across the thick pile of the carpet. "And if that's all you can say, too." He put his arms around Darya's waist. "But that's not my first choice. I'm not just visiting, love. I'm recruiting. Julian Graves and I are going a long way; no one knows how far, and no one knows if we'll make it back. Can you come with us? Will you come with us?"

  Darya glanced across to her terminal, where the remaining entries for the fifth edition were awaiting their final proofreading; and at her diary on the desk, with its heading Important Events—seminars and colloquia, publication due dates and the arrival of visiting academics, birthdays and vacations and picnics and galas and dinner parties. She went across to her desk, switched off the terminal, and closed her diary.

  "When do we leave?"

  Chapter Three: Miranda

  The waiting rooms of Miranda Spaceport were Downside, in the ninth passenger ring twenty-six miles from the foot of the Stalk. Cleanup and maintenance was the job of the service robots, but ever since the incident when the Doradan Colubrid ambassador had accidentally been left to sit and patiently starve to death while robots dutifully dusted and mopped and polished around and over her, human supervisors had made occasional routine inspections.

  One of those supervisors had been hovering around waiting room 7872, where a silent figure occupied and overflowed a couch in the room's center. Supervisor Garnoff had three times approached, and three times retreated.

  He knew the life-form well enough. It was an adult Cecropian, one of the giant blind arthropods who dominated the Cecropia Federation. This one was strange in two ways. First, she was alone. The Lo'tfian slave-translator who invariably accompanied a Cecropian was absent. And second, the Cecropian had an indefinably dusty and battered look. The six jointed legs were sprawled anyhow around the carapace, rather than being tucked neatly beneath in the conventional rest position. The end of the thin proboscis, instead of being folded into a pouch on the bottom of the pleated chin, was drooping out and down onto the dark-red segmented chest.

  The big question was, was she alive and well? The Cecropian had not moved since Garnoff first came on duty five hours earlier. He came to stand in front of her. The white, eyeless head did not move.

  "Are you all right?"

  He did not expect a spoken answer, although the Cecropian, if she was alive, undoubtedly heard him with the yellow open horns set in the middle of her head. Since all Cecropians "saw" by echolocation, sending high-frequency sonic pulses from the pleated resonator on the chin, she had sensitive hearing all through and far beyond the human frequency range.

  On the other hand, she could not speak to him in any language that he would understand. With hearing usurped for vision, Cecropians "spoke" to each other chemically, with a full and rich language, through the emission and receipt of pheromones. The pair of fernlike antennas on top of the great blind head could detect and identify single molecules of the many thousands of different airborne odors generated by the apocrine ducts on the Cecropian's thorax.

  But if she was alive, she must know that he was talking to her; and she should at least register his presence.

  There was no reaction. The yellow horns did not turn in his direction; the long antennas remained furled.

  "I said, are you all right?" He spoke more loudly. "Is there anything you need? Can you hear me?"

  "She sure can," said a human voice behind him. "And she thinks you're a pain in the ass. So bug off and leave her alone."

  Garnoff turned. Standing right in front of him was a short, swarthy man in a ragged shirt and dirty trousers. He needed a shave, and his eyes were tired and bloodshot. But there was plenty of energy in his stance.

  "And who the devil might you be?" It was not the supervisor's approved form of address to Mirandan visitors, but the newcomer's strut encouraged it.

  "My name's Louis Nenda. I'm a Karelian, though I don't see how that's any of your damn business."

  "I'm a supervisor here. My business is making sure everything's going all right in the waiting rooms. And she"—Garnoff pointed—"don't look too hot to me."

  "She's not. She's tired. I'm tired. We've come a long way. So leave us alone."

  "Oh? Since when did you learn to read Cecropian thoughts? You don't know how she feels. Seems to me she might be in trouble."

  The squat stranger began to stretch to his full height, then changed his mind and sat down, squeezing onto the couch next to the Cecropian. "What the hell. I got too much to do to hassle on this. Atvar H'sial's my partner. I understand her, she understands me. Here, take a look at this place from ten feet up."

  He sat silent for a second, frowning at nothing. Suddenly the Cecropian at his side moved. Two of the jointed forearms reached out to grip Garnoff by the waist. Before the supervisor could do more than shout, he was lifted into the air, high above the Cecropian's great white head, and held there wriggling.

  "All right, At, that's enough. Put him down easy." Louis Nenda nodded as the Cecropian gently lowered Garnoff to the floor. "Happy now? Or do you need a full-scale demo?"

  But Garnoff was already backing away, out of reach of the long jointed limbs. "You can both stay here and rot, far as I'm concerned." When he was at a safe distance he paused. "How the hell did you do that? Talk to her, I mean. I thought no human could communicate with a Cecropian without an interpreter."

  Louis Nenda shrugged without looking at Garnoff. "Got me an augment, back on Karelia. Send and receive. Cost a lot, but it's been worth it. Now, you go an' give us a bit of peace."

  He waited until Garnoff was at the entrance to the waiting room, forty meters away. "
You were right, At." The silent and invisible pheromonal message diffused across to the Cecropian's receptors. "They're here on Miranda, staying over in Delbruck. Both of 'em, J'merlia and Kallik."

  There was a slow, satisfied nodding of the blind white head. "So I surmised." Atvar H'sial vibrated her wing cases, as though shaking off the dust of weeks of travel. "That is satisfactory. Did you establish communication?"

  "Not from here. Too dangerous. We don't call 'em, see, till we know we can get to 'em in person. That way nobody can talk them out of it."