Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  People like me.

  So they say, Captain (and now they're getting ruder), you're full as an egg with talk, and you waffle on to anybody who'll listen to you. But what happened to Midas, where it rains molten gold, or Rainbow Reef, where the dawn is green and the nightfall blazing scarlet and midday's all purple? Hey? What happened to them? Or to Shamble and Grisel and Merryman's Woe? They were once there, and now they're not. Where did they go? You can't answer that one? Shame on you.

  I don't let myself get mad (though it's not easy). I burn slow, and I say, Ah, but you're forgetting the wind.

  The wind? That always gets them.

  That's right, I say, you're forgetting the Great Galactic Trade Wind. The wind that blows through the whole galaxy, taking worlds that were once close together and pushing them gradually farther and farther apart.

  They look down their noses at me, if they have noses, and say, We've never heard of this wind of yours.

  Ah, well, I say, maybe there's a lot you never heard of. Some people don't call it the Galactic Trade Wind. They call it Differential Galactic Rotation.

  At that point, whoever I'm talking to usually says "Huh?" or something just as bright. And I have to explain.

  The whole Galaxy is like every spiral galaxy, a great big wheel, a hundred thousand light-years across, turning in space. Most of the people I talk to at least know that much. But it's not like a Downsider wheel, with rigid spokes. It's a wheel where the spiral arms closer to the galactic center, and all the stars in them, turn at a faster rate than the ones farther out. So you take a star—for example, Sol. And you take another well-known object—say, the Crab Nebula in Taurus, six thousand light-years farther out toward the galactic rim. You find that Sol is moving around the galactic center about thirty-five kilometers a second faster than the Crab. They're separating, slow but sure, both moving under the influence of the Galactic Trade Wind. (And the wind can work both ways. If you drop behind, because you're farther out from the center, all you have to do is fly yourself in closer to the center, and wait. You'll start to catch up, because now you're moving faster.)

  But what about the Crab Nebula?, ask some of my Downsider friends, the ones who have understood what I'm talking about. It's a natural object; you can't fly it around like a ship. Will it ever come back to the vicinity of Sol?

  Sure it will come back, I say. But it'll take a while. The Crab will be close to Sol in another couple of billion years.

  And then their eyes pop, assuming they have eyes, and they say, Two billion! None of us will be around then.

  And I tell them, That's all right, I'm not sure I will be, either. In fact, some nights I'm not sure I'll be around next morning.

  But what I think is, you Downsiders—as usual—are asking the wrong question. What I'd like to know about isn't the Lost Worlds, it's the Lost Explorers. What happened to Aghal H'seyrin, the crippled Cecropian who flew the disrupt loop through the eye of the Needle Singularity? We had one message from her—we know she survived the passage—but she never came back. Or where did Inigo M'tumbe go, after his last planetfall on Llandiver? He sent a message, too, about a "bright braided collar" that he was on his way to explore. No one has ever seen it or him. And what do you make of the last signal from Chinadoll Pas-farda, rolling up the black-side edge of the Coal Sack on a continuous one-gee acceleration, bound, as she said, for infinity?

  There's your interesting cases: people, not dumb Lost Worlds. I want to know what happened to them, my fellow explorers.

  I'll fly until I find out; someday. Someday I will know.

  —from Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort:

  Jetting Alone Around the galaxy; by

  Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)

  Commentator's Note: Shortly after completing this passage, the last in his published work, Captain Sloane embarked on a voyage to the Salinas Gulf, following the path of the legendary Inigo M'tumbe. He never returned. His final message told of a mysterious serpentine structure, fusion-bright against the stellar backdrop, gradually approaching his ship. Nothing has been heard from him since.

  It is perhaps ironic that Captain Sloane himself has now become the most famous and most sought after of all Lost Explorers.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Indulgence arrowed at the surface of the planet in a suicide trajectory, held in the grip of a beam of startling yellow that controlled its movement absolutely. Nothing that Darya Lang did with the drive made a scrap of difference.

  Her two companions were worse than useless. Tally reported their position and computed impact velocity every few seconds, in a loud, confident voice that made her want to scream, while Dulcimer, the "Master Pilot of the spiral arm" who claimed to thrive on danger, had screwed himself down tight into a moaning lump of shivering green. "I'm going to die," he said, over and over. "I'm going to die. Oh, no, I don't want to die."

  "Seven seconds to impact," Tally said cheerfully. "Approach velocity two kilometers a second and steady. Just listen to the wind on the hull! Four seconds to impact. Three seconds. Two seconds. One second."

  And then the ship stopped. Instantly—just a moment before it hit the ground. They were hovering six feet up, no movement, no deceleration, no feeling of force, not even—

  "Hold tight!" Darya shouted. "Free-fall."

  No feeling even of gravity. Dulcimer's scoutship fell free in the fraction of a second until it smacked into the surface of Genizee with a force that jarred Darya's teeth. Dulcimer rolled across the floor, a squeaking ball of green rubber.

  "Approach velocity zero," E.C. Tally announced. "The Indulgence has landed." The embodied computer was sitting snug in the copilot's seat, neurally connected to the data bank and main computation center of the Indulgence. "All ship elements are reporting normal. The drive is working; the hull has not been breached."

  Darya was beginning to understand why she might be ruined forever for academic life. Certainly, the world of ideas had its own pleasures and thrills. But surely there was nothing to compete with the wonderful feeling of being alive, after knowing without a shadow of doubt that you would be dead in one second. She took her first breath in ages and stared at the control boards. Not dead, but certainly down, on the surface of an alien world. A possibly hostile world. And—big mistake, Hans Rebka would have planned ahead better—not one of their weapons was at the ready.

  "E.C., give us a perimeter defense. And external displays."

  The screens lit. Darya had her first view of Genizee—she did not count the brief and terrifying glimpses of the surface as the ship swooped down at it faster and faster.

  What she saw, after weeks of imagining, was an anticlimax. No monsters, no vast structures, no exotic scenery. The scoutship rested on a plain of dull, gray-green moss, peppered with tiny flecks of brilliant pink. Off to the left stood a broken region of fanged rocks, half hidden by cycads and tall horsetail ferns. The tops of the plants were tossing and bending in a strong wind. On the other side stretched an expanse of blue water, sparkling with the noonday lightning of sunbeams reflected from white- topped waves. Now that she could see the effects of the wind, Darya also heard it buffeting at the hull of the Indulgence.

  There was no way of telling where the seedship had landed. The chance that a pair of ships would arrive even within sight of each other, on a world with hundreds of millions of square kilometers of land, was negligible. But Darya reminded herself that she had not landed—she and the Indulgence had been landed, and the same may have been true of Hans Rebka and the seedship.

  "Air breathable," Tally said. "Suits not required."

  "Do you have enough information to compute where the seedship made planetfall?"

  Instead of replying, E.C. Tally pointed to one of the display screens that showed an area behind the Indulgence. A long, shallow scar in the moss revealed an area of black mud of just the right width. But there was no evidence of the ship itself.

  Darya scanned the whole horizon at high resolution. There was n
o sign of Hans and his party. No sign of Zardalu; no sign of any animal life bigger than a mouse. Other than the disturbed area of moss, nothing suggested that the seedship was anywhere within five thousand kilometers of the Indulgence. And—her brain should have been working earlier, but better late than never—the message drone could be launched only when the seedship was in orbit. So although the ship might have landed there, it was unlikely by this time to be anywhere close-by. Rebka and the others were probably far away. What should she do next? What would Hans Rebka or Louis Nenda do in such a situation?

  "Open the hatch, E.C." She needed time to think. "I'm going to take a look outside. You stay here. Keep me covered, sound and vision, but don't shoot at anything unless you hear me shout. And don't talk to me unless you think there's something dangerous."

  Darya stepped down onto the surface, her feet sinking an inch into soft mud covered with a dense and binding thicket of moss. Close up, the bright spots were revealed as little perfumed flowers, reaching up on hair-thin stalks of pale pink from the low ground cover of the plants. Every blossom was pointing directly at the noon sun. Darya walked forward, feeling guilty as each step crushed fragile and fragrant beauty. She walked down to the shore, where the moss ended and an onshore wind was carrying long, crested breakers onto pearly sand. She sat down above the high-water mark and stared at the moving water. A few yards in front of her feet the shore was alive with inch-long brown crustaceans, scuttling frantically up and down to try to stay level with the changing waterline. If this region was typical, Genizee was a fine world on which to live, an unlikely spawning ground for the most feared species of the spiral arm.

  "Professor Lang." E.C. Tally's voice in her earpiece interrupted her thoughts. "May I speak?"

  Darya sighed. The interruptions were coming before she had even started to generate ideas. "What do you want, E.C.?"

  "I wish you to be aware of what this scoutship's sensors are reporting. Four organisms—very large organisms—are approaching you. Because of their location, however, I am unable to provide an image or an identification."

  That did not make sense to Darya. Either the ship's sensors could see what was coming, or they could not. "Where are they, E.C.? Why can't you get an image?"

  "They are in the water. About forty meters offshore from where you are sitting, and coming closer. We are unable to obtain images because the sensors are not designed for good underwater sighting. I disobeyed your instructions and spoke to you of this because although the weapons of the Indulgence are activated, you forbade me to shoot them without your command. But I thought you would like to know—"

  "My God." Darya was on her feet and backing away from the wind-tossed water. Every random surge in the breakers became the head of a huge beast. She could hear Hans Rebka lecturing her: Don't judge a planet by first appearances.

  "Although what you said was not, strictly speaking, a shout, if you wish me to fire, I can certainly do so."

  "Don't shoot anything." Darya hurried back toward the Indulgence. "Just keep watching," she added as she rounded the curve of the hull and headed for the port from which she had exited. "Watch, and I'll be back inside in—"

  Something rose from its crouching position on the gray-green moss and sailed toward her in a long, gliding leap. She gasped with shock, tried to jump away, and tripped over her own feet. Then she was sprawled on the soft turf, staring at eyes that seemed as wide and startled as her own.

  "Tally!" She could feel her heart pounding in her throat. "For heaven's sake, why didn't you tell me . . ."

  "You gave specific instructions." The embodied computer was all wounded innocence. "Do not speak, you said, unless you think there is something dangerous. Well, that's just J'merlia, walking all nice and peaceful. We agree that he's not dangerous, don't we?"

  "There was evidence of Zardalu presence," J'merlia said. "But when Captain Rebka and the others entered the buildings, they were all empty."

  The Lo'tfian was leading the way, with E.C. Tally and Dulcimer just behind. A few minutes cuddled up next to the main reactor of the Indulgence, added to J'merlia's assurance that the members of the party who had landed earlier were all alive and well, had worked wonders. The Chism Polypheme was three shades lighter, his apple-green helix was less tightly coiled, and he was bobbing along jauntily on his muscular spiral tail.

  Darya was walking last, uncomfortable about something she could not put a name on. Everything was fine. So why did she feel uneasy? It had to be the added sense that Hans Rebka insisted any human had the potential to develop. It was a faint voice in the inner ear, warning that something—don't ask what—was not right. Hans Rebka swore that this voice must never be ignored. Darya had done her best. The defense systems of the Indulgence were intelligent enough to recognize the difference in appearance of different life-forms. Darya had commanded the ship to allow entry of any of the types present in their party, but to remain tight-closed to anything that remotely resembled a Zardalu. J'merlia had said that the buildings were empty, but who knew about the rest of the area?

  As they approached the cluster of five buildings Darya realized that the structures must actually be visible from the place where the Indulgence had landed. It was their odd shapes, matching the natural jutting fingers of rock, that made them easy to miss. They were built of fine-grained sandy cement, the same color as the beach and the rock spurs. One had to come close to see that they rose from a level, sandy spit of land and must be buildings.

  "I went into orbit with the seedship and launched the message drone that told the path through the singularities," J'merlia went on. "The others remained here."

  "And they are in the buildings now?" They were halfway along the projecting point of land; still Darya could find no cause for her uneasiness.

  "I certainly have not seen them emerge."

  Darya decided that it must be the manner of the Lo'tfian's answers. J'merlia was usually self-effacing to the point of obsequiousness, but now he was cool, laconic, casual. Maybe it was freedom from slavery, at last asserting itself. They had all been wondering when that would happen.

  J'merlia had paused by the first of the buildings. He swiveled his pale-yellow eyes on their short stalks and stabbed one forelimb at the entrance. "They went in there."

  As though the word was a signal, a blue flicker moved in the dark recesses of the building. Darya went past Dulcimer and E.C. Tally and craned forward for a better look. As she did so, there was a scream from behind and something banged hard in her back and clung to her. She managed to keep her feet and turn. It was the Chism Polypheme, collapsing against her.

  "Dulcimer! You great lout, don't do that."

  The Polypheme was blubbering and groaning, wrapping his nine-foot length around her and clinging to her with his five little arms. Darya struggled to break loose, wondering what was wrong with him, until suddenly she could see past Dulcimer and E.C. Tally, along the spur of land that led back to the beach.

  Zardalu.

  Zardalu of all sizes, scores of them, still dripping with seawater. They blocked the return path along land, and they were rising on all sides from the sea. And now she also knew the nature of that blue flicker inside the building behind her.

  Impossible to run, impossible to hide. Darya felt sympathy with Dulcimer for the first time. Blubbering and groaning was not a bad idea.

  * * *

  Humans, Cecropians—maybe even Zardalu—might entertain the illusion that there were things in the universe more interesting than the acquisition of information. Perhaps some of them even believed it. But E.C. Tally knew that they were wrong—knew it with the absolute certainty that only a computer could know.

  Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; it was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E.C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his cir
cuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.

  Here was an excellent example. Back on Miranda he had learned from Kallik the language she used to communicate with the Zardalu. It was an ancient form, employed back when the Hymenopts had been a Zardalu slave species. Most of the spiral arm would have argued that learning a dead language used only to speak to an extinct race was an idiotic waste of memory capacity.

  But without it, E.C. Tally would have been unable to communicate with his captors in even the simplest terms.

  The Zardalu had not, to Tally's surprise, torn their four captives apart in the first few moments of encounter. But they had certainly let everyone know who was boss. Tally, whisked off his feet and turned upside down in the grasp of two monstrous tentacles, had heard an "Oof!" from J'merlia and Darya Lang on one side, and a gargling groan from Dulcimer on the other. But those were sounds of surprise and disorientation, not of pain. Tally himself was moved in against a meter-wide torso of midnight blue, his nose squashed against rubbery ammoniac skin. Still upside down, he saw the ground flashing past him at a rare rate. A moment later, before he had time to take a breath, the Zardalu that held him was plunging under the water.