Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  And then, in a class by themselves, there are the Zardalu.

  I say in a class by themselves, for one good reason: unlike all the others, there's no doubt that the Zardalu are real.

  Or rather, they were real. The reference texts tell you that the last Zardalu perished about eleven thousand years ago, when a handful of subject races of their thousand-world empire rose up against them and exterminated them.

  That's the references. But there's a rumor you'll find all around the spiral arm, as widespread as greed and as persistent as sin, and it says otherwise. It says: not every Zardalu perished. Somewhere in some hidden backwater of the arm, you may find them still. And if you do, you'll live (but not long) to regret it.

  Now, I'm not a man who can resist a temptation like that. I've been bouncing all over the arm for over a century, poking into all the little backwater worlds. Why not gather the scraps of information from all over the arm? I said to myself. Then make a patchwork quilt out of them, and see if it looks like a map with a big X saying "Here be Zardalu."

  I did just that. But I'll spare you the suspense, right now, and say I never found them. I'm not saying they're not there; only that I never ran them down. But in the course of searching, I found out a lot of mixed facts and rumors about what they were—or are—like.

  And I got scared. Forget their appearance. They were supposed to be huge, tentacled creatures, but so are the Pro'sotvians, and a gentler, milder life-form is hard to imagine. Forget their legendary breeding rates, too. Humans can give them a run for their money, in intention and devotion to the job at hand, if not in speed of results. And even forget the fact that they ruled over so many worlds. The Cecropians call it the Cecropia Federation, not Empire, but they control almost as many worlds as the Zardalu did at their peak.

  No. You have to look at what the Zardalu did.

  It's not easy to see that. If you've ever gone on a fossil hunt for invertebrate forms, you'll know that you never find one. They decay and vanish. All you ever find is an inverse, an imprint in the rock where the life-form once sat in the mud. It's a bit like having to look at a photographic negative, with the photograph itself never available.

  The Zardalu were supposed to be invertebrates, and in searching for their deeds you have to examine their imprint: what is missing on the worlds that they ruled.

  Even that takes an indirect approach. We don't know where the Zardalu homeworld was, but it is reasonable to assume that they spread outward through a roughly spherical region, because that's the way that every other clade has spread. So it is very plausible to assume that the edges of the region of the Zardalu Communion were the most recently conquered, while places a bit farther in were conquered earlier. On hundreds of worlds around the Zardalu Communion, we find evidence of wonderful civilizations—the arts and sciences of intelligent species, but all long-vanished. And if you look at the age when those cultures disappeared, you find that the closer to the middle of the Zardalu Communion territory the planet lies, the longer ago its civilization vanished.

  The obvious conclusion is not terribly alarming: when the Zardalu conquered, they insisted that the subject races abandon their own culture in favor of that of the Zardalu. There are precedents for that in human and Cecropian history.

  It's two other facts that frighten: first, there are marginally intelligent species on most worlds of the Zardalu Communion, but there are far fewer true intelligences than you would expect, based on the statistics for the rest of the spiral arm. And second, all the evidence suggests that the Zardalu were highly advanced in the biological sciences.

  And this is what they did: They conquered other worlds. And as they did so they reduced the intelligence of the inhabitants, bringing them down to a level where a being was just smart enough to make a good slave. No capacity for abstract thought, so no ability to plan a revolt, or cause trouble. And, of course, no art or science.

  The Great Rising, from species still undegraded, saved more than their own worlds. If the Zardalu had gone on spreading, their sphere of domination would long ago have swallowed up Earth. And I might be sitting naked and mindless in the ruins of some old Earth monument, not smart enough to come in out of the rain, chewing on a raw turnip, and waiting to be given my next order.

  And at that point in my thinking, I reach my main conclusion about the Zardalu: if they are extinct, then thank Heaven for it. The whole spiral arm can sleep better at night.

  —from Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort:

  Jetting Alone Around the Galaxy; by

  Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)

  Chapter Eleven

  Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did.

  "No, no, and absolutely no," Julian Graves said. He had reappeared in response to Darya's call over the ship's address system, but he had offered no reason for his absence. He looked exhausted and worried. "Even if what you say is true, it changes nothing. So what if the Anfract and the nested singularities are Builder creations? We cannot afford to risk the Erebus and additional members of our party."

  "Captain Rebka and his team are in more danger than we realized."

  "More danger than what? None of us had any idea at all of the degree of danger to the seedship when they left. And we agreed that until three days had passed we would do nothing."

  Darya began to argue, claiming that she had never agreed to any such thing. She called on Dulcimer to support her, but the Polypheme was too far gone, a long unwound corkscrew of apple-green giggling on the hard floor. She tried E.C. Tally. The embodied computer played his visual record of the actual event through the display system of the Erebus, only to prove that Darya had nodded agreement along with everyone else.

  "Case closed," Graves said. He sat there blinking, his hands cradling his bald head as though it ached almost too badly to touch.

  Darya sat and fumed. Julian Graves was so damned obstinate. And so logical—except when it came to understanding the complicated train of her own analysis of the Anfract. Then he didn't want to be logical at all.

  She was getting nowhere. It took the unexpected arrival of the message drone to change the mind of the former Alliance councilor. Graves opened it carefully, lifted out the capsule, and hooked it into the Erebus's computer.

  The result was disappointing. There was a continuous record showing the path that the seedship had taken through the uncharted region of the annular singularities, a trip which had been accomplished in less than twenty-four hours. But then there was nothing, an inexplicable ten-hour gap in the recording with no information about the ship's movements or the activities of its crew.

  "So you see, Professor Lang," Julian Graves said. "Still we have no evidence of problems."

  "There's no evidence of anything." Darya watched as the capsule ran to its uninformative end. "Surely that in itself is disturbing."

  "If you are hoping to persuade me that the absence of evidence of a problem itself constitutes evidence of a problem—" Graves began. But he was interrupted.

  "Mud," said a vague, croaking voice. "Urr. Dirty black mud."

  When the message capsule had been removed, the useless outer casing of the drone had been discarded on the control-room floor. It had rolled to rest a couple of feet in front of the open, staring eye of the Chism Polypheme. Now Dulcimer was reaching out with his topmost arm, scratching the side of the drone with a flexible and scaly finger.

  "What's he mumbling about?" Graves asked.

  But Darya was crouched down at the side of the Polypheme, taking her first close look at the casing of the drone. All they had been interested in when it reached the Erebus had been the messages it was carrying. The drone itself had seemed irrelevant.

  "Dulcimer's right," she said. "And so am I!"

  She lifted the cylinder and carried it across to Julian Graves. He stared at it blankly. "Well?"

  "Look at it. Touch it. When the seedship
left the Erebus, all its equipment was clean and in good working order—have Tally run the record, if you don't believe me. Now look at the antenna and drone casing joints. They're filthy, and there has been repair work done on them. That's a replacement cable. And see here? That's mud. It was vacuum-dried, on its flight back, but before that the whole drone plunged into wet soil. Hans and the others not only found a planet—they landed there."

  "They agreed, before they left, that they would not do that." Graves shook his bald and bulging head reprovingly, then winced. "Coating material can occur anywhere, even in open space. Anyway, why cover a drone with mud?"

  "Because they had no choice. If the drone was battered and muddied like this in landing, the ship must have been damaged."

  "You are constructing a case from nothing."

  "So let me make you one from something. Sterile coating material picked up in space is quite different from planetary mud. I'll bet if I dig some of this dirt from the drone's joints and run an analysis, I'll find microorganisms that don't exist in any of our data banks. If I do, will you accept that as proof that the seedship landed—and on an unfamiliar world?"

  "If. And it is a big if." But Julian Graves was taking the drone wearily from Darya, and handing it to E.C. Tally.

  Darya saw, and understood the significance of that data point. She had won! She moved on at once to the next problem: how to make sure that she was not, for any reason, left behind on the Erebus when others went through the singularities to seek Hans Rebka and his party.

  In parallel, Darya's mind took satisfaction in quite a different thought: She had changed an awful lot in one year. Twelve months before in faculty meetings at the Institute, she would have wasted an hour at that point, presenting more and more evidence to buttress her arguments; and then the subject would have been debated endlessly, on and on, until everyone in the meeting was either at the screaming point or mad with boredom.

  Not anymore, though, at least for Darya. Somehow, without ever discussing such things, Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda had taught her a great truth: Once you win, shut up. More talk only makes other people want to argue back.

  There was a corollary to that, too: If you save time in an argument, don't waste it. Start work on the next problem.

  Darya admired her own new acuity as she left the control room and headed for the cargo bay that housed the Indulgence. It was time for work. When E.C. Tally returned with an analysis of that soil sample and Graves made up his mind what to do, Darya wanted to be second only to Dulcimer himself in knowledge of the Polypheme's ship.

  Before she even reached the cargo bay, Julian Graves was calling her back. He had already made up his mind. He knew what had to be done: Darya would fly into the nested singularities. E.C. Tally would accompany her, with Dulcimer as pilot of the Indulgence. Julian Graves would remain on the Erebus. Alone.

  Baffling. But say it again: Once you win, shut up.

  She grabbed Tally and Dulcimer, hustled them onto the Indulgence, and was heading the ship out of the cargo bay of the Erebus—before Julian Graves had a chance to change his mind.

  In her eagerness to leave, Darya did not apply another of Hans Rebka's survival rules: If you win too easy, better ask what's going on that you don't know about.

  Hans Rebka might have guessed it at once: Julian Graves needed to be alone, for some compelling reason of his own. But Hans was not there to observe Graves, or to warn Darya of something else. He had observed her over the past year, and he would have agreed with her: there had been big changes in Darya Lang. But those changes were incomplete. Darya was too self-confident. Now she knew just enough to be dangerous to herself and to everyone around her.

  Rebka would have offered a different corollary to her Great Truth: Don't waste time solving the wrong problems.

  Darya Lang was intellectually very smart, up at genius level. But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data. That was where Darya's troubles began. In Hans's terms, when she lacked the right data she still did not know how to acquire it.

  That was not her fault. Most of Darya's life had been spent evaluating information collected by other people, of far-off events, times, and places. Data were printouts and articles and tables and images. Success was defined by an ability to digest a huge amount of information from all sources, and then devise a way to impose order and logic on it. Progress was often slow. The path to success might be decades long. No matter. Speed was not an issue. Persistence was far more important.

  Hans Rebka was a graduate of a different school of life. Data were events, usually happening in real time and seldom written out for inspection. They could be anything from an odd instrument reading, to a sudden change in the wind, to a scowl that became a smile on a person's face. Success was measured by survival. The road to success might remain open only for a fraction of a second.

  Rebka had noticed the anomaly when Julian Graves first announced who would go down in the seedship to look for Genizee, and who would remain on the Erebus: Graves would not go, although it was Graves who had felt most strongly the need to seek out the Zardalu—Graves who had resigned from the Council, Graves who had organized the expedition, Graves who had bought the ship. And then, with Genizee identified and the Zardalu hidden only by the shroud of singularities, Julian Graves had suddenly declined to pursue them. "I must stay here."

  Now Graves had again refused to leave the Erebus. Unfortunately, Hans Rebka had not been around to warn Darya Lang that his second refusal must be regarded as far more significant.

  To penetrate the nested singularities for the first time had been an episode of tension, of cautious probing, of calculated risk. For the Indulgence, following the path of the seedship less than two days later, the journey was routine. The information returned with the drone had provided a description of branch points and local space-time anomalies in such detail that Dulcimer took one look at the list, sniffed, and set the Indulgence to autopilot.

  "It's an insult to my profession," he said to E.C. Tally. The Chism Polypheme was lounging in his pilot's chair, a lopsided device arranged so that his spiral tail fitted into it and all his arms had access to the control panel. He was cool again, his skin returned to its dark cucumber green, but as the heat faded from him he became increasingly irritable and haughty. "It's a slur on my Chismhood."

  Tally nodded, but did not understand. "Why is it an insult and a slur?"

  "Because I'm a Polypheme! I need challenges, perils, problems worthy of my talents. There is nothing to this piloting job, no difficult decisions to make, no close calls—a Ditron could do it."

  Tally nodded again. What Dulcimer seemed to be saying was that a Chism Polypheme found work unsatisfying unless there was substantial risk attached to it. It was an illogical attitude, but who was to say that Polyphemes were logical? There was no information about them in Tally's data bank.

  "You mean you thrive on difficulty—on danger?"

  "You better believe it!" Dulcimer leaned back and expanded his body, stretching to full length. "We Polyphemes—specially me—are the bravest, most fearless beings in the Galaxy. Show us danger, we eat it up."

  "Indeed." Tally took a microsecond to mull over that odd statement. "You have often experienced danger?"

  "Me? Danger?" Dulcimer swiveled his chair to face Tally. An embodied computer was not much of an audience, but there was nothing else available. "Let me tell you about the time that I beat the Rumbleside scad merchants at their own game, and came this close"—he held up his top two hands, a fraction of an inch apart—"to being killed along the way. Me and the scad merchants had been having a little disagreement, see, about a radiation shipment I made that shrunk on the way—nothing to do with me, as I explained to them. They said not to worry, things like that can happen to anyone, and anyway they had another job for me. I was to go to Polytope, fill my cargo hold with local ice, and bring it back to Rumbleside. Water-ice? I said. That's right, they said. There's a lot of water-ice on Polytope? I
said. There sure is, they said, any amount. But we want just Polytope water, ice, no other. And we want big penalties if you don't deliver on time.