Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  "But let's be ridiculous and suppose they did want us to land in one piece, because they had other plans for us."

  "Like eating us." Nenda spat out the bit of moss that he was chewing and made a face. "They'd like us better than this stuff. I've not forgotten their ideas from last time. They like their meat super-fresh."

  "Whatever they want to do with us, it would only make sense for them to bring us to a landing place where they are. So where are they?"

  "Maybe they're worried about our weapons," Nenda offered. "Maybe they want to have a look at us from a distance. They wouldn't think we were dumb enough to fly here in a ship that didn't have weapons."

  "Then why not land us hard enough to make sure that all our weapons were put out of action?" Rebka ignored Nenda's crack about coming weaponless, but he stored it up for future reprisal. "It doesn't make sense, soft-landing us and then leaving us alone."

  "With respect," J'merlia said softly. "Atvar H'sial would like to suggest that the source of your perplexity is in one of your implicit assumptions. She agrees that we were surely landed here by design, although her own senses did not allow her to detect the presence of the beam that tore the seedship from its trajectory and deposited it at its present location. But according to what you have told her, the beam came from the moon—that hollow, artificial moon of which you spoke—not from Genizee itself. What does that suggest? Simply this: the unwarranted assumption that you are making is that the Zardalu who are here also brought us here."

  J'merlia paused. There was a long silence, broken only by the ominous sigh of strong wind across gray moss. It was close to sunset, and with the slow approach of twilight the weather was no longer the flat calm that had greeted their arrival.

  "That don't help us at all," Louis Nenda said at last. "If the Zardalu didn't grab our ship and bring us here, then who the blazes did?"

  "Atvar H'sial does not know," J'merlia translated. "However, she suggests that what you are asking is a quite different—though admittedly highly significant—question."

  * * *

  The seedship's computational powers had not been affected by impact with the surface of Genizee. From the planet's size, mass, orbital parameters, and visible features, the computer readily provided an overview of surface conditions.

  Genizee rotated slowly, with a forty-two-hour day, about an axis almost normal to its orbital plane. The atmospheric circulation was correspondingly gentle, with little change of seasons and few high winds. The artificial moon, circling just a couple of hundred thousand kilometers away, looked huge from Genizee's surface, but its mass was so tiny that the planet's tides came only from the effects of its sun; again, the slow rotation rate decreased their force.

  The climate of mid-latitude Genizee was equable, with no extremes of freezing or baking temperatures. Surface gravity was small, at half standard human. As a result the geological formations were sharp and angled, sustaining steeper rock structures than would be possible in a stronger field; but the overall effect of those delicate spires and arches was more aesthetic than threatening, as abundant vegetation softened their profiles. The final computer summary suggested a delicate and peaceful world, a cozy environment where native animals needed little effort to survive. There should be nothing to fear from the easygoing native fauna.

  "Which proves just how dumb a computer can be," Louis Nenda said. "If Zardalu are easygoing and laid back, I'll—I'll invest everything I have in Ditron securities."

  He and Atvar H'sial had lagged behind Rebka and Kallik as they walked along the shore. With three hours to go to planetary nightfall, Hans Rebka had decreed that before they could rest easy they needed to take a close look at the structures that Kallik had found. He was particularly keen to have Atvar H'sial's reaction. Given her different suite of sensory apparatus, she might perceive something where others did not.

  J'merlia had been left behind in the seedship. He had already begun work on the repair of the hull and the message drone, and he had insisted that the work would go fastest with least interference. If they stayed away for three hours or more, he said, he would have the ship ready for takeoff to orbit.

  "Investment in securities of any kind begins to appear as an attractive alternative to our own recent efforts for the acquisition of wealth." The pheromonal message diffused across from Atvar H'sial, who was crouching low to the ground and reducing her speed to a crawl to match Nenda's pace. "It is never easy to be objective about one's own actions and one's accomplishments, but it occurs to me that our recent history has not been one of uninterrupted triumph."

  "What you mean?"

  "You and I chose to remain on Serenity to acquire an unprecedented and priceless treasure of Builder technology. When we were returned to the spiral arm by the Builders' constructs—for whatever reason—our new objective became the planetoid of Glister, for the purpose of the acquisition of Builder technology there, and the repossession of your ship, the Have-It-All. To that end, we agreed that we would need the use of some other ship, and we set out for Miranda with that in mind. But see where our fine strategy has taken us. We find ourselves deep in the middle of one of the spiral arm's least understood and most dangerous regions, on a world we believe to be native to the arm's most ferocious species, with a ship that is presently incapable of taking us to orbit. One wonders if our record is much superior to a suggested Ditron investment."

  "You're too negative, At. Did you ever see a big snake like a python swallow a big fat pig?"

  "That event, I am happy to say, has not been part of my life experience."

  "Well, the thing about it is this: once it starts, it can't stop. Its teeth curve backward, so it has to open its mouth wider an' wider an' swallow an' swallow an' swallow until it downs the whole thing. See, it can't give up in the middle."

  "How very unedifying. But a question appears to be in order. Do you see us in the role of the python, or of the pig?"

  "At, none of that. Stop puttin' me on."

  Atvar H'sial's pheromones were in fact filled with sly self-satisfaction as they walked the last quarter mile to the structures along the shoreline. It took a lot to shake a Cecropian's invincible self-satisfaction and conviction of superiority.

  There were five buildings, each made of a fine-grained material like cemented gray sand. The shore of the blue-gray sea jutted out at that point into a long, spoon-shaped peninsula, four hundred yards long, with the beach falling away steeply on each side of it. The buildings, each sixty feet tall, sat together in a cluster within the bowl of the spoon, with water lapping up to within thirty yards of their walls. Although the tides of Genizee were small and the winds usually mild, it was easy to imagine that the water sometimes came up to and even inside all of the buildings.

  Kallik and Hans Rebka had walked out along the long handle of the spoon and already made a circuit of each building by the time Nenda and Atvar H'sial reached them.

  "Not a window in sight." Rebka advanced to an elliptical doorway, three times as tall as he was and at least six feet across. "Atvar H'sial, you'll see a lot more than the rest of us in there, even with the lights we've got. Lead the way, would you, and pass word through Nenda about what you're seeing."

  When Nenda had translated, the Cecropian nodded and shuffled forward into the first of the buildings. The pleated resonator below her chin was vibrating, while the yellow horns on each side of her head were turned to the dark interior. Louis Nenda followed right behind her, then Kallik. Rebka stayed at the entrance. He was their watchdog, dividing his attention between the activity inside and the deserted shore. As the light faded, the interior of the building became increasingly hard to see. Squinting west, Rebka estimated that sunset was less than an hour away.

  "Three steps up, then four down. Watch how you go," Nenda translated. "At's standing where the inside divides into two, into a couple of big rooms that split the whole interior in half. One's nearly empty—a bedroom, she'd guess. Wet floor, though—whatever sleeps there likes everything real da
mp. The other room's more interesting. It has furnishings: long tables, various heights, no chairs, and a wet floor, too. There's a lot of weird growing stuff, all different shapes an' sizes, where you might expect equipment. At's not sure what most of it is. She thinks it shows the Zardalu preference for fancy biological science and technology, where we and the Cecropians would use machines. That's what the race memories and old legends about the Zardalu say—they could make biology stand on its head, do with natural growth that we still can't get near yet. Nothin' looks dangerous, but it might be. Long tunnel in the middle of the room, spiraling down farther than At can see—way underground, she'd guess from the echoes. Impossible to know how far it might go. And there's more equipment by the tunnel's edge. Hold on, she's changing sonic frequencies. Wants to see if she can get an inside look without goin' too close."

  There were a few seconds of silence, followed by a startled grunt from Nenda.

  "What is it?" Rebka was edging his way farther into the building, propelled by curiosity.

  "Somethin' really impenetrable, At says. Her echolocation is bouncing off it right at the surface. Hold on. She's going to have a feel."

  There was a longer pause, even harder to take, then Rebka heard a rapid shuffle of movement a few yards away in the darkness. "What's happening?" he asked. As he spoke, Kallik and Nenda popped into sight, with Atvar H'sial just behind.

  "See that!" Nenda said as they emerged into the fading light. He was pointing at something that the Cecropian was cradling in her front legs. "An' you thought we had a mystery before we went in."

  Atvar H'sial extended the object that she was holding out toward Rebka. He stared at it, too surprised and baffled to speak. It was a small black icosahedron about six inches across, as familiar and unmistakable as it was mysterious. He had seen hundreds like it, scattered on free-space structures all around the spiral arm. He had seen them on planets, too, used for every possible purpose—studied in science laboratories, worshiped and feared, used as talismans and royal sigils and doorstops and paperweights.

  No one knew how to penetrate one of those objects without causing the interior to melt to an uninformative gray mass. No one knew their purpose, though there were hundreds of suggestions. No one knew how old they were, or how they had reached the places where they were found.

  Most workers believed that the black icosahedrons were related to the Builders, although they were on a scale far smaller than the usual artifacts. Analysts had amassed powerful arguments and statistical evidence to support those claims. A few researchers, equally adamant, denied any Builder connection. They argued with some validity for another vanished race, as old as or older than the Builders.

  Rebka reached out to take the little regular solid from Atvar H'sial. As he did so there was an urgent whistle of warning from Kallik and a cry of "Behind!"

  Rebka spun around. For the past few minutes he had been neglecting his self-imposed task as lookout. The sun was on the horizon, setting in a final glow of pink and gold. It cast four gigantic elongated shadows along the spit of land on which he and the others were standing. And those shadows were moving, as the objects that were throwing them emerged from the water and reared up to their full heights. Behind them, swarming up from the deep offshore, came at least a dozen others.

  Zardalu. The light was poor, but those black shapes against the dying sun could be mistaken for nothing else. They were boiling up from the sea, more and more of them, threshing the water with the force of their movements. Within seconds they were ashore.

  And ready for action. There was no place to hide as they came gliding forward on splayed tentacles, straight toward Hans Rebka and his three companions.

  Back at the seedship, J'merlia had watched the others go with mixed feelings. He certainly wanted to be with his dominatrix, Atvar H'sial, and he certainly was curious to know more about the structures on the shoreline that Kallik had seen. But at the same time he wanted to be left in peace to repair the seedship. It was something that he could do faster and better than anyone else in the group, and their presence would only slow his progress.

  He watched them leave, nodding at Rebka's final order: "If anything happens to us, don't try heroics. Don't even think that way. Get the ship up to space where it's safe, and send that drone back to the Erebus. We'll look after ourselves."

  Their departure confirmed J'merlia's conviction that repairs would go faster without them. He had told Rebka and Atvar H'sial that the seedship and drone fixes would be about three hours' work, but in less than two the drone was ready to fly, the seedship pull patch was in position, the seal perfect, and everything was ready for space. J'merlia tidied up, peered at the sun, and wondered how long it would take them to walk back.

  Then it occurred to him that they did not have to walk. The seedship was ready to go to orbit, but it was just as capable of making atmospheric flights, short or long, around the surface of Genizee. In fact, a minimal hop over to the structures that Kallik had described would serve a dual purpose. It would save the others a walk, and it would provide a proof—though he knew that none was needed—that the seedship was back to full working condition.

  The ship lifted easily at his command. He took it to ten thousand feet and held it there for half a minute. Perfect. Completely airtight. J'merlia descended to two hundred feet and sent the ship cruising west at a soundless and leisurely twenty miles an hour. Soon he could see the buildings, looming above the flat, sandy promontory. And there, unless he was mistaken, were Kallik and Captain Rebka and Louis Nenda and his beloved dominatrix, Atvar H'sial, standing by the entrance to one of the buildings.

  J'merlia was fifty yards from the spit of land, all set to descend and looking forward to their surprise when they saw the carefully repaired and functioning seedship, when the nightmare began: he saw Zardalu, dozens of them, seething up from the dark water. They were on shore—standing upright—advancing fast on Atvar H'sial and the others. And his master and companions had nowhere to go! The Zardalu were in front of them; the steep-sided beach and deep water were on all sides. J'merlia watched in horror as Atvar H'sial turned and led the trapped group into the dark interior of one of the buildings.

  They were only thirty or forty paces ahead of the Zardalu. The land-cephalopods came gliding with ghostly speed on their powerful tentacles, rippling across the dark sand. Within a few seconds they, too, had crowded into the first of the buildings.

  J'merlia lowered the ship to thirty feet and waited, hypnotized with horror. No one emerged. No sound rose up to his straining ears. The buildings and the sandy promontory remained empty and lifeless, while the sun fell its last few degrees in the darkening sky.

  And then there was nothing but darkness. J'merlia wanted to land, but Rebka's instructions had been quite specific.

  Get the ship up to space, where it's safe. And get that drone back to the Erebus.

  A Lo'tfian found it almost impossible to disobey direct orders. J'merlia miserably initiated the ascent command to take the seedship up into orbit, away from the surface of Genizee. He stared down at the world that was fast diminishing beneath him to a tiny disk of light, and wondered what was happening to the four he had left behind. Were they fighting? Captured? Already dead? He felt terrible about leaving.

  He launched the little drone without adding to its message, and sat slumped at the seedship control console. What now? Rebka had given no further instructions. He had only told J'merlia what not to do: Don't try heroics. But J'merlia had to go back and try to rescue Atvar H'sial—except that was in conflict with Rebka's command.

  J'merlia sat locked in an agony of indecision. He longed for the good old days, when all he had had to do was to follow Atvar H'sial's orders. Why did Julian Graves and the others keep pushing freedom on him, when all it did was make him miserable?

  He scarcely noticed when the seedship raced past the artificial moon of Genizee. He was only vaguely aware of Genizee's sun, off to one side, and the all-around glow of the annular singulariti
es that surrounded the system. And he did not see at all the great swirl of light in space, its vortex moving into position directly ahead of the trajectory of his speeding ship. The first that J'merlia knew of the shifting whirlpool was an unpleasant shearing sensation through his whole body.

  Singularity. No time for thought, no time for action. His body flexed, twisted in an impossible direction, turned to smoke.

  Isolated essential singularity. Amorphous, physically divergent. J'merlia felt himself stretching, expanding, dissociating. His problems were over now. He would obey Rebka's command . . . because the decision had been made for him . . . because return to Genizee was no longer an option . . . because he was . . .

  . . . because he was . . . dead. With that thought, J'merlia popped out of existence.

  THE ZARDALU

  You'd think that the spiral arm would have dangers and horrors enough, God knows, without people having to go on and invent new ones. But human (and inhuman) nature being what it is, we're not satisfied with natural bogeymen, so every world you go, you hear the local tales of terror: of free-space vampires, ship-eaters that suck every living essence from a vessel as it goes by and leave an empty mechanical shell flying on through the void; of computer-worlds, where every organic being that ever approaches them is destroyed; of the Malgaians, baleful sentient planets who so hate large-scale development that when the surface changes become large enough, the Malgaian modifies its environment to kill off the intruders; of the Croquemort Time-well, where a ship can fall in and stay there in stasis until the end of the universe, when planets and stars and galaxies are gone and everything has decayed to a uniform heat-bath; of the Twistors, shadowy forces that live in the strange nonspace occupied by ships and people when they undergo a Bose Transition, performing their Twistor distortions in ways so subtle that you never realize that the "you" going in on one end of a transition and the "you" coming out at the destination are quite different beings.