"You have never been able to disguise that fact, at least from me. You and he, in your incessant bickering over the human female—"
"Forget the goddamned human female. Or better still, don't forget her. Ask yourself this: If I had the hots for her the way that you claim, would I have brought Hans Rebka to Miranda Port?"
"It seems unlikely." The pheromones held an overtone of grudging admission.
"Unlikely? It's preposterous."
"So you are admitting your interest in the female."
"No such thing. I don't know why the Inter-clade Ethical Council called this meeting—I wish I did. And I had nothing to do with Hans Rebka being here, either. I wish he weren't, but that has nothing to do with Darya Lang. He's a troubleshooter. A good one, too, who's dug himself out of some desperate fixes. But his being here means we're lookin' at trouble, with us likely to be in the middle of it."
Louis Nenda had been crouching in the shadow of Atvar H'sial's broad carapace, the location where he found pheromonal communication most easy. Now he stepped clear and went to slide the door wide open. He peered along the corridor.
"No sign of Rebka. But I can tell you one thing for certain. If he's part of the meeting, we're not being called in for a garden party. Better be ready, At. I don't know what's coming up tomorrow, but you can bet it'll be a real doozy."
* * *
Standing at the narrow opening in the doorway, Hans Rebka had sensed—or imagined—the faintest odor from within the chamber. It was sulfur-grass, with an overtone of something less familiar. Alien. Which alien, he neither knew nor cared. Without a sound, he retreated as fast as possible along the corridor.
Originally, his wanderings within the Upside Miranda Port administrative station had been more or less random. Now he had a destination. He sought the nearest of the external chambers, where an observer could settle in to stare at the stars.
Before he got there he experienced one more distraction. He passed one of the numerous chambers that housed the station's distributed computer facilities. A row of windows permitted Hans to see everything inside the brightly lit room, including a solitary male human seated cross-legged before a gray instrument panel. The man had his back to the windows, so Hans had a view only of neatly trimmed black hair square-cut at the nape of the neck. Some kind of thin tube or cable led from the instrument panel toward the man's hands or hidden chest. Hans guessed at a neural bundle, though what the man could possibly want with such a thing was anyone's guess.
And none of Hans Rebka's business. He watched for a few more seconds, then moved on.
The observation chamber sat at the end of a short tunnel that projected from the outer shell of the station. Hans could sit in a swivel chair, orient himself in any direction that he chose, and study every part of the heavens not obscured by the body of Upside Miranda Port station itself. Of course, in keeping with the natural cussedness of things, what most interested Hans was at the moment shielded from view.
That could never be more than a temporary problem, because the whole structure of the Upside Miranda Port station slowly rotated. Hans faced maybe a five-minute wait.
He occupied the inevitable delay doing what he had earlier declined to do, and examined the contents of the Shroud. The nets held ships of all sizes, shapes, origins, and ages, in dizzying variety and numbers for as far as the eye could follow. One nearby vessel caught his eye, from its strange yet familiar outline. He had seen that design, like a hammer with a head at both ends, only once before. On that occasion he had been far out in Zardalu Communion territory, where the outpost world of Bridle Gap orbited its neutron star primary, Cavesson. And Hans had at the time confirmed that the alien ship had been manufactured nowhere in the local arm: it was something built in a far-off time and place, by the species known as the Chism Polyphemes.
What was such a ship doing here? Was it intended to provide proof of the boast made by the Miranda Port sales staff, that you could find in the Upside Shroud examples of every ship ever made?
The slow rotation of the station was bringing what he wanted to look at into view, and that pushed consideration of the alien ship to the back of his mind. Visual inspection of the glowing band of light that was now appearing would tell him nothing, and he stared at it for only a few moments. The Milky Way shone brighter without the diffusing effects of a planetary atmosphere, but the spiral arms beyond the local arm were still shrouded by interstellar dust and gas clouds. He had known that in advance, and already selected the observation wavelengths that he wanted. He switched to them. The chamber had been designed so that a viewer need not be aware that the "windows" now displayed the readings of radiation and particle monitors in spectral and energy regions far beyond what human senses could experience directly. Suddenly, Hans could "see" through the obscuring veils of dust and gas.
See to the edge of the local arm. See across the Gulf. See the Sag Arm, looking no different now from the way it had appeared at other times when he had done deep galactic viewing. And see, beyond the Sag Arm, the galactic center itself, with the million-star-mass black hole lurking at its hidden heart.
Hans brought his attention back to the Gulf. It appeared empty, as it had always been empty. It offered no sign of the pinpoints of light provided by the giant display he had walked through inside the station. So those bright points did not represent stars. They were a creation of the display itself, not something visible in nature.
But what were they? Hans had no idea. He lay back in the swivel chair and selected visible wavelengths, so that he was once more seeing by the natural light that came in through the chamber's transparent walls.
The view was familiar and relaxing. The chair was comfortable, more comfortable than most beds that he had slept in.
As the heavens turned slowly about him, Hans decided that although he had learned little, it was all that he was likely to get tonight.
There was always tomorrow. Which would take care of itself.
When you have nothing to do, sleep.
Within seconds he was drifting off. In his final moments of consciousness, he imagined he was walking out along the staggered line of lights that lay like stepping-stones across the Gulf.
CHAPTER FIVE
A cry from the grave.
It had been Darya's intention to be early to the meeting and take a place as close to Julian Graves as possible. That way there could be no accusation that any new disruptions had anything to do with her.
Her plan changed abruptly when she came to the corridor leading to the chamber where they were due to meet. Someone—something—was ahead of her. She smelled an ammoniac odor, and saw a huge midnight-blue form wide and tall enough to block the corridor.
A shiver passed through her body, at the same time as her mind told her to turn and run. Thirty meters ahead of her, standing more than four meters tall on its thick, splayed tentacles, was an adult Zardalu. The bulbous head was twice the width of a human body. The creature was—thank Heaven—facing away from Darya, but she knew that the front of the head bore two great lidded eyes of cerulean blue, each as big across as her stretched hand. Beneath the eyes was a cruel hooked beak, more than big enough to grasp within it a human body.
The Zardalu had been the bogeymen of a dozen different species and a thousand worlds, monstrous land-cephalopods believed extinct for eleven thousand years but still the living nightmare of myths and legends. Darya knew that the Zardalu were again a presence in the local arm—she had been on their homeworld of Genizee, and considered herself lucky to escape—but she had never expected to encounter an adult Zardalu here. No Zardalu should be free to move without watchful guards ready to annihilate it at the first sign of trouble.
Darya took a couple of steps backward—and was grasped firmly from behind.
Her heart froze in her chest, until she realized that those were human arms encircling her. Louis Nenda, pawing her again! She felt a little guilty at refusing to go to dinner with him, but didn't the man ever learn? Terror chang
ed to anger, and she spun around ready to give him the hardest slap he had ever felt.
Her hand was already raised and moving when she saw who was behind her.
"Hans!"
"Who else has hugging rights on you?" He was smiling.
"Hans, I had no idea that you were coming to Miranda Port. Where have you been? I've sent message after message for two months, and never had one word of answer."
"None of them got to me. I wasn't where I could be reached." He was holding her at arm's length. "Darya, you're looking really good."
"I wish I could say the same for you. Hans, what have you been doing to yourself? You look like hell."
"If you think this is bad, you should have seen me a week ago. Darya, I didn't get your messages because I couldn't. I was in jail on Candela."
"Why?"
"I'll tell you about it later. Just now, I want to know why I'm at Upside Miranda Port. Being called here probably saved my life. Let's get to the meeting room."
"Hans, there's a Zardalu in this corridor." Darya stared ahead. "Or there was. Where did it go?"
"The only place it could possibly have gone—into the meeting chamber." He was moving forward.
"Hans, slow down. I'm telling you, it's a Zardalu."
"All right, so it's a Zardalu. I feel sure it's sedated, or brain-dead, or some form of simulacrum. Otherwise nobody would let it loose."
He had reached the entrance to the chamber, where he paused. Darya followed and moved cautiously to where she could see what was happening inside.
Her idea of getting to the meeting early had occurred to plenty of others. A fresh-faced, dark-haired human male whom she did not recognize was already seated where she wanted to be, right at the front. Behind him was the Cecropian, Atvar H'sial, flanked by the little Hymenopt, Kallik, and the Lo'tfian, J'merlia. And behind them, in the chamber's biggest open space, stood Louis Nenda.
She owed him an apology, but this wasn't the time for it. Because in front of Nenda, sprawling its great length along the floor, was the Zardalu. It was making a series of clicking and snorting sounds.
Nenda snorted right back at it. He said, "Yeah, yeah. Don't gimme that," and made his own set of clicks. After a few seconds of hesitation, a thick meter-long tongue of royal purple emerged from the Zardalu's head.
Louis Nenda said, "I should think so. That's a damn sight better." He stepped forward and placed his right boot on the outstretched tongue.
Darya gasped in horror, expecting to see Nenda picked up in thigh-thick tentacles and dismembered. He heard the gasp, glanced her way, and nodded a greeting. "Morning. Archie here has been gettin' above himself while he was down on Miranda. I had to use Zardalu slave lingo to remind him who's boss an' who brought him here in the first place."
He lifted his foot from the Zardalu's tongue. "Now, Archie, you get over to the back of the room. You're too big and ugly to sit in front with the rest of us." He produced another set of clicks, and the Zardalu rose, bowed its great head, and slithered away to the rear of the chamber.
Nenda turned back toward Darya and seemed to notice Hans Rebka for the first time. "I'd say that little and ugly ought to sit in the back, too."
"Don't let me stop you, then. Go there if you feel you ought to." Rebka calmly made his way toward the front row of seats.
Louis Nenda growled and was heading for Rebka when Atvar H'sial placed her great body between them. She raised her forelimbs, one over Nenda's head and another above Rebka, and hissed menacingly.
"All right, all right." Nenda stepped around the Cecropian so that he could see Hans Rebka. "Just so you don't get the wrong idea about why I'm layin' off now, it's because Atvar H'sial says that the meeting's ready to start—she can smell Julian Graves in the corridor. If we try to fight she says she'll hold us upside down an' shake sense into us. She can do it, too. You don't understand pheromone talk, but J'merlia will confirm her words if you have any doubts."
"I'll believe Atvar H'sial." Rebka continued to the front row of seats, followed by Darya Lang. "As for you, we can take this up some other time."
"The pleasure will be mine." Nenda squeezed into the last place up front, next to Darya, just as Julian Graves entered the room.
If the councilor felt surprise at finding an audience already in place—it was well before the official start time of the meeting—he did not choose to reveal it. He nodded his bald, domed head at Hans Rebka, said, "I heard of your arrival. Good," and turned to face the whole group.
"Since everyone is here, and since you all know each other, I'll get down at once to business."
Darya glanced past Hans Rebka at the dark-haired man on her left. The Zardalu at the back of the room—Archie, an incongruous name for such a giant beast—must be the one that Louis Nenda had dragged along, trussed and wriggling, when they all escaped from Labyrinth. But who was the strange human?
She decided not to ask. Julian Graves already blamed her for interrupting yesterday's meeting.
The councilor went on, "Perhaps the composition of this group has allowed some of you to guess why we are assembled here today. But let me be specific.
"We, like everyone else, grew up with the knowledge that there were Builder artifacts scattered around the local arm. The artifacts had been present for millions of years, and we assumed that they would always be there. Some of us devoted a large part of our lives to studying the Builder artifacts and seeking to understand them."
Darya felt it was safe to nod. She certainly fell into that category.
"However," Julian Graves continued, "two years ago, an astonishing thing happened. Following the event known as Summertide, in the Dobelle system, the artifacts started to change. I have heard half a dozen proposed explanations as to the cause of those changes, but one fact cannot be denied: one by one, the artifacts vanished. We saw the appearance of a single new artifact, Labyrinth. And shortly after that, Labyrinth disappeared along with every other artifact. All of you were present during that climactic event. Since then, we have seen no signs of an artifact anywhere in our local arm of the galaxy. For the past two years, all has been quiet."
Perfectly true, and well-known to any five-year-old. So why are we having this meeting? But Darya remained silent.
Graves said, "At least, we assumed that all was quiet. Then, two months ago, a ship carrying a Chism Polypheme arrived at Upside Miranda Port. The Polyphemes are a species rarely seen in our local arm, since their home world is somewhere in the Sag Arm. The Polyphemes are famously reluctant to give accurate information on its whereabouts."
Louis Nenda, next to Darya, sniffed loudly. "Why don't you tell it like it is, Councilor? Any Polypheme would rather lie than tell the truth. They're the most crooked, unreliable, deceitful species in the galaxy. If you believe anything that the one who came here said, you're a fool."
"You may be right, although the Chism Polyphemes accord the doubtful honor of maximum duplicity to humans. However, in this case it was not necessary to take the Chism Polypheme's word for anything, since it could speak not a word. The ship finished the journey on automatic pilot. The Polypheme was dead on arrival."
Darya felt a spasm of movement on either side of her. Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda were hard to shock, but they were shocked now. So was she. The Sag Arm was thousands of lightyears away. Only a vastly long-lived species, like the Polyphemes, would face the prospect of a Gulf crossing from one spiral arm to the next. As for one dying, she had never heard of such a thing. By human standards, a Chism Polypheme was immortal.
Julian Graves went on, "Normally, the interior of a ship arriving at Miranda Port is considered private property and off-limits. However, in this case there were exceptional circumstances. The port authority felt a need to know what event, be it natural or unnatural, had killed the Polypheme. To ensure that suitable procedures and propriety were observed, they called in a member of the Ethical Council to be present when the ship was entered. Upon an initial investigation she was unable to determine the cause of de
ath. The body appeared quite intact, although a closer examination revealed that almost every cell within it had been ruptured and burst by some unknown agent. Soon afterwards, the councilor called for my assistance. She had, as a move to determine if there might be some danger of contamination, examined the ship's log. And what she found was almost beyond belief. The Chism Polyphemes, astonishing as it may seem, have perhaps been lying to the species of our spiral arm—and for thousands of years."
Louis Nenda said, "It's like I told you—"
"There is therefore no need to tell me again. The ship's log contained a complete listing of Bose transition points visited. The coordinates of the most recent transition nodes were in the Gulf."
Darya felt the tingle all the way up her spine. No one in the Fourth Alliance, or in the Cecropia Federation whose boundary lay much closer to the Gulf, knew that those Bose nodes were there. Did it mean . . . ?
It did. Julian Graves was continuing, "A chain of Bose nodes exists, forming a link between this spiral arm and the Sag Arm. The Chism Polyphemes certainly did not create such a chain, but obviously they have been making use of it for millennia. The notion that the Polyphemes endured enormously long crossings of the Gulf is a myth of their own devising. The Polypheme's ship log showed that it had crossed the Gulf using exactly eleven Bose nodes. The total travel time to Miranda was a matter of weeks."
Julian Graves made a gesture with his right hand, and the display of the principal clades and neighboring Gulf that Darya had seen the day before appeared. "As you see, the Bose nodes begin at a location easily reached from here, and they continue to points deep within the Sag Arm. A new and easy path exists from this arm to the neighboring one.
"That, however, was not the main reason why the councilor called me, nor the reason why I called this meeting. The ship contained other information within its data banks. The councilor concluded—and I agree with her conclusion—that there is evidence of Builder artifacts in the Sagittarius Arm."
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