He sounded unbelievably cold and casual. Darya had to remind herself that there was another side to the man. In crises, he seemed able to suppress every trace of emotion. All was calm logic. Maybe that's why he was such a good troubleshooter.
If you wanted empathy and feeling for others, you would take Julian Graves. If encyclopedic knowledge was the requirement, without much judgment to go with it, then E.C. Tally was the person of choice. If you needed someone who through long experience had a sense of Builder constructs and how they might and might not act, maybe you would turn to Darya herself. But if you were in such deep trouble that you thought you would never emerge alive, then you turned to Hans Rebka—and you hoped that sentiment and finer feelings would not interfere with the need for the split-second decisions and hard actions that survival demanded.
Ben was already in the passenger seat, his body turned a little to give him as much comfort as he could find. He needed real medical treatment, but he would not get it here. Hans was in the back. He was moving things around there, and Darya did not choose to turn her head and find out what they were.
She stared straight ahead, out through the car's forward window. The sun was lower yet, dipping toward the horizon with what seemed like infinite slowness. The day on Marglot was very long, and they had to be prepared to endure an equally long night.
The rain fell steadily, soaking into the springy vegetation and the tall conical growths that hid the small mummified animals. The hillside was as bleak a prospect as Darya had ever seen. Tonight they would rest as best they could, but tomorrow they must begin to ask and answer a different question: Was it possible for humans to survive on Marglot, as the food supplies of their suits ran out?
Darya's brain felt turned off. She was not thinking about anything at all as she stared at the hillside ahead. She saw nothing and was expecting to see nothing, when her trance was broken by a change in the light outside. A vertical shaft of illumination was forming, as though a second sun shone through a rift in the clouds to produce a bright column of light. The shaft was about four meters across, and it struck the ground where Darya, Hans, and Ben had been expelled from it.
"Hans!"
"What?" Incredibly, his voice sounded as though she had wakened him from sleep.
"Look outside. In front of the car. Something's happening."
"Huh?" But he was sitting up, leaning over Darya's shoulder. "That wasn't there ten minutes ago."
"No. I saw it forming. What is it, Hans?"
"I don't know. But it's changing."
The column of light no longer ran from heaven to earth. Its upper end was fading, even as the lower part lifted, solidified, and took on a definite shape. It formed a glowing oval whose lower end hung three meters or so above the soaked earth. As they watched it changed further, into a perfect sphere that slowly drifted downward.
It was three meters above the wet vegetation—two meters, one meter, and still descending. As the lowest point made contact with the wet plants, the sphere emitted a flash of light so bright that the photosensitive faceplates of the suits instantly darkened to protect their eyes.
When they could see again the bright sphere had disappeared. But it had not vanished without leaving a trace. Where the sphere had touched down, something remained. Three somethings. Three suited human figures. Three people, back to back, sitting down on the wet hillside with legs outstretched in front of them.
As Darya watched in disbelief, one figure climbed slowly to its feet. It was facing away from the car, so she could not see into the faceplate of the suit. The person within would not at once see her.
A voice said, "Well, I suppose you'd have to say that this is an improvement. When you have been nowhere at all, and sitting under a force of two and a half gees while you were nowhere, almost anywhere else qualifies as better. But as to why we were brought here . . . "
The words tailed off, but Darya did not need to hear more. Only one person in the Sagittarius Arm possessed that deep, hollow voice. The man standing with his back to the car was Julian Graves.
And with him, scrambling to their feet with expressions on their faces that suggested they were as surprised as Darya, were two others whom Darya recognized. There was no question that they were Torran Veck and Teri Dahl.
Which left only the biggest question of all. It was the one asked by Julian Graves of himself and his companions, but it applied equally well to Darya, Hans, and Ben: Why had they been brought here?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Planning a landing.
The interior of the Have-It-All had become a place of hushed conversations and secret meetings. Kallik, J'merlia, and Archimedes sat huddled—in so far as anyone could huddle with a creature the size of Archimedes—in the drive room of the ship.
"Master Nenda is very angry." Kallik spoke with the authority of one who knows.
"Does he blame us?" J'merlia asked. Archimedes added, "Do you think he will disembowel me?"
Kallik looked puzzled. "Is there any reason why he should?"
"It is the standard way of registering disapproval among the Zardalu."
"I would advise you not to point this out to Master Nenda. In any case, he is not angry with you, or with any one of us." Kallik's rings of bright eyes glanced in all directions to be sure that no one was approaching. "He blames Claudius, and to a lesser extent Sinara Bellstock."
"But why?" Archimedes's speech was improving fast, although he was still more comfortable with the master-slave language of the Zardalu. "Are we not in orbit around Marglot, as we wished to be? Kallik, it was your assurance that we had achieved our correct destination."
"That is true. At least, we are orbiting a world with four poles. I cannot imagine many such specimens are to be found in the whole galaxy, still less in a small region of the Sag Arm."
"Kallik, I see no poles. Yet you assert that my eyes are superior to those of everyone else on board."
"What do you expect, pointers sticking out of the ground with labels on them? Archimedes, observe. The world below shows a clear demarcation into two hemispheres. There is a daylight side facing the sun, and another side which is in night. The day-night terminator constantly advances, since the world rotates. There is a fixed axis of rotation, and two poles are located at the ends of that axis. Let us call them, for convenience and in accordance with common usage, the North Pole and the South Pole. However, there is also a second division into hemispheres unrelated to sun position. Note that we have one side of high albedo, a bright half which faces always away from the gas-giant planet around which the planet orbits. Lacking a name, we will for the sake of convenience name that gas-giant world as M-2. Then we also have a less bright though sometimes cloud-covered side, always facing toward M-2."
"I see those. But I do not understand their meaning."
"You require training in simple orbital mechanics. Perhaps, on some other occasion, there will be time for such a thing. Meanwhile, observe." Kallik gestured to the screen showing the planet below. "The gas-giant world M-2 is hot, with a mean temperature of eight hundred degrees. Marglot—for I am convinced that this world is Marglot—revolves around M-2. It is tidally locked to it, so that the same face of Marglot is always presented in that direction. That hemisphere, of course, will be warm, and its center will logically be known as the Hot Pole. The other face never receives any heat from M-2, and precious little from the parent star. Its brighter appearance, as spectral reflectance measurements confirm, derives from a surface covered with snow and ice. The center of that hemisphere, the coldest place on the planet, is the Cold Pole."
"So you believe that we are exactly where we wish to be, at the world of the four poles. Why then is Master Nenda enraged at Claudius and at Sinara Bellstock?"
"Why, because they delayed us. Had we left Pompadour promptly, we would not be the last of the expedition to arrive. Thanks to Claudius and Sinara, we have been deprived of the possible advantages of getting here first."
"Will Master Nenda dis
embowel Claudius and Sinara?"
"No. Could you perhaps cease this obsession with disemboweling?"
"I will try. But still I do not understand. When we first arrived, Master Nenda seemed pleased. He reported that there were no signal beacons from other ships, and therefore we were ahead of everyone else."
"That was my fault." J'merlia hung his narrow head in a human gesture of remorse. "I was operating the communications console, and I reported to my dominatrix, Atvar H'sial, that no ships' transponders or signal beacons were active in this stellar system."
"Was that a false statement?"
"No. But it was an insufficient one. I failed to search for the much weaker signals from individual suits, which transmit on different frequencies. To my shame, it was Master Nenda himself who thought to look for and discovered such suit signals, emanating from the surface of Marglot. Worse than that, all but one of the other members of the original expedition now appear to have found their way there. The signal from the suit of Lara Quistner alone is missing."
"How can that be?" Archimedes stared out of the observation port, scanning the planet with his great luminous eyes as though an individual suit might be visible to him even from a distance of five hundred kilometers. "If they are on Marglot, they must somehow have been brought there. Yet you found no ships' transponder or signal beacons. Kallik, where are the ships?"
"You ask me the same question that Master Nenda asked. To my shame, I could provide no answer. He is very angry."
"With reason. We have failed him." Archimedes wrapped his great midnight-blue tentacles protectively around his mid-section. "He will surely disembowel all of us. Perhaps he will gut Claudius and Sinara Bellstock first, but then it will be our turn. Kallik, you have worked longest for Master Nenda and you know him best. Please speak to him on our behalf. Seek to take the edge off his anger and impose on us a lesser penalty. My bowels are very dear to me."
* * *
Louis was indeed angry. Angry at Claudius, who had made a Bose transition when his brains were fried to a crisp. In doing that the Polypheme had endangered Nenda's precious Have-It-All, not to mention everyone inside it. Chism Polyphemes were all liars. You could not trust one when he swore that the navigators of his species practiced their art best when they were on a radiation high.
The Polypheme lay on the floor of the middle cargo hold, a limp and wailing mass of cucumber-green misery. He had, he swore, the worst hangover that any living being had ever endured. That generated no sympathy in Louis. He kicked Claudius hard on the back of his blubbery head as he left.
Louis was just as angry with Sinara Bellstock. What she had swallowed, sniffed, injected, or inserted while down on Pompadour was her business. But it was certainly Louis's business when Sinara, after offering a display of physical affection so enthusiastic and vigorous that Louis was willing to keep going while the Have-It-All disintegrated around them, had suddenly and completely passed out.
Nothing could wake her. Louis could have continued and she wouldn't even have noticed. But he had tried necrophilia before, and he didn't like it.
He had rolled Sinara to her own cabin and left her there to sleep it off. Then he went to find his clothes, ready to roam the interior of the ship looking for something to kill.
That was when he became really angry. Not with Claudius, and not with Sinara. With Louis Nenda.
How had he so badly misjudged the rest of the crew of the Pride of Orion? Darya Lang, quite apart from being a sexy piece, understood the Builders and their works better than anybody. Hans Rebka was a weaselly little runt, but he had been in trouble often and always found a way out of it. Those two might well have hopped and wiggled their way to Marglot. They had headed off to the big dead world in the system where they first arrived, hoping to do just that.
But what about the other witless collection? What about Julian Graves, so stupid that he considered the life of a pea-brained Ditron as important as the life of a human being? What about dinglebrain E. Crimson Tally, who if he had been a human would have died twice already. As for the "survival specialists" . . .
Sinara was a romantic nympho who put pleasure ahead of everything. All right for fun, but for survival? And she was the best of them. But they had all, Ressess'tress knew how, beaten Louis, Atvar H'sial, and the Have-It-All to Marglot. Sure, one of them was missing, but she might pop up any time. Maybe she was underground. The rest were on the surface, six of them near the Hot Pole and the other—E.C. Tally, from the suit's identification—sitting near the Hot Pole/Cold Pole equator.
How come Tally was so far from all the others? There was no evidence from the radio signals of a ship, pinnace, or aircar anywhere on Marglot. How had Tally traveled such a distance, many thousands of kilometers? Louis could think of only one answer. The Marglotta must have provided transportation. Here was something to make him madder yet. You responded to a call for help across thousands of lightyears, and when you were stupid enough to respond, they were sitting cozy at home and apparently doing fine.
Louis stormed off to find Atvar H'sial. The Cecropian was crouched at her ease before an instrument panel of her own devising.
"Have you been following all this?"
"To the best of my humble abilities."
"At, modesty don't become you."
"I have also received a detailed briefing from Kallik, by way of J'merlia."
"Then you know we've been screwed. We're arrivin' last of the party, and if we can take anything at all with Julian Graves watchin', it will be scrapings."
"You and I agree on the facts, Louis. However, we draw different conclusions."
"At, they're ahead of us and down there—every one of 'em."
"Correct. Six in one location, the seventh in another. But through J'merlia, I commanded Archimedes, whose optical powers are amazing and perhaps even unparalleled, to seek movement on the cloud-free portions of Marglot. He reports numerous small moving objects, all on the frozen hemisphere, but has detected nothing that could be a substantial piece of airborne or ground transport equipment."
"We've got our pinnace, At. We don't need none of the Marglotta's junk."
"True. But Julian Graves and his cohorts need it. Without it, they are confined to a tiny portion of the planetary surface. All the rest—" Atvar H'sial waved an articulated limb toward the window. Marglot hung in the sky beyond it, although with the Cecropian's echolocation vision she could only be inferring the looming presence of the planet from other sensors. "All the rest, Louis, is ours to explore and exploit.
"Consider the options. Are the Marglotta alive? Then we have responded to their call for help, and we are ready for their thanks and willing to begin negotiations—on our terms. Are the Marglotta dead? Then the whole of the planet, except for an insignificant area where the rest of our original party is located, is ours for the taking. We will of course rescue Julian Graves and the others and be prepared to receive their gratitude—eventually."
* * *
There was no justice in the universe, and a man had no right to expect any. Louis had known that long before he was a man—before he was weaned, probably, though his memories didn't go back that far.
Even so, it was never pleasant to have your nose rubbed in injustice one more time.
He was sitting in his own quarters, at his desk and working on the difficult question of the landing party, when Sinara walked in.
No, she didn't walk in; she waltzed in. The laws of morning-after said that she should be feeling like hell and looking as green as Claudius. Instead she was rose pink and bright-eyed, with a spring in her step. The bottom of her mouth ought to feel as though bats without toilet-training had roosted all night on her upper palate. But when she said, "Good morning—and a great morning it is," she leaned over and gave Louis a kiss on his unshaven cheek. Her breath was as sweet, fresh, and perfumed as the spring violets on Sentinel Gate.
A woman without a trace of conscience, who showed no signs of guilt for anything she had done? That was Sina
ra. The thought brought back memories of Glenna Omar. What was Glenna doing right this minute, back on the garden world of Sentinel Gate? Louis didn't know, but he had his suspicions.
He gestured to the seat at the other side of his desk. "Sit down."
"Over there? Not over here?" She was standing by him and breathing into his ear.
"Not now. We got work to do. We're heading down to Marglot. Question is, who goes and who stays here?"
"Everyone should go. It maximizes our chances of survival."
"What makes you think so?"
"In our survival training classes on Persephone, we were provided logical proofs, based on long-established game theory results, that the probability of survival in an unknown environment is proportional to the size of that party."
"That's fine, if you happen to regard survival as a game. In our case, I can see three or four things wrong with the idea that everybody should go. First, whoever we send may need backup. If the Have-It-All went down to the surface and somehow got smashed up, that would be it. There's no sign of another ship anywhere in the Marglot system. That means we gotta send the pinnace down, and keep the Have-It-All up here and out of danger in case it's needed for a rescue mission. It could make it down easy enough on autopilot, but I'd rather have somebody at the controls who can make the right decision if things get hairy."
"So you have to leave Claudius here. He's the best pilot. But I don't think from the look of him this morning he's in any condition to travel."
"That's his problem, not ours. Claudius is a navigator, an' I don't know how good he pilots when he's not juiced up. Anyway, are you willin' to put that much faith in a Chism Polypheme? I'm not. Give him half a chance and Claudius would be out of here an' take the Have-It-All with him. He says this ship is no good, but you can see his eye roll when he looks at some of the fixtures. I don't care how bad he's feelin', he has to go down 'cause I don't trust him here.
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