Resurgence

by Charles Sheffield

  "Best if most of you stay where we are. I'll take a look." Hans expected opposition, but the others were still hardly more than half awake. He slipped out, pushing aside the thick leaf layers.

  The night was unexpectedly cold. It was also cloudy. Was the area around the Hot Pole ever anything but cloudy?

  He walked around the cone-house in time to see a pinnace making a soft landing about fifty meters away.

  Smart thinking. Whoever was flying it had homed in on the suit beacons and knew that they were in the cone-house. But the pilot wouldn't know who else or what else might be inside with them. Rebka walked toward the ship. When the hatch opened and the figure who emerged was Louis Nenda, somehow that was no surprise at all.

  * * *

  The cone-house was big enough, even for eleven. After the excited—and bewildered—greetings, comparisons began.

  Comparisons, because you could hardly call them explanations. Each group in turn told what had happened after leaving the Pride of Orion and described how they came to be on Marglot. Julian Graves was the last to speak. Long before he was done, Louis Nenda was wriggling and fidgeting where he sat. He raised his eyebrows at Hans Rebka.

  Hans waited for Graves's final words, then said to Nenda, "I agree. You're right."

  "Right? I'm more than right. I'm damned right, and this is all wrong." And, when the others stared at Nenda, "Don't you see it, any of you except Rebka?"

  Hans said, "They don't. We have to explain." He turned to the rest. "There's such a thing as coincidence, but this goes beyond it. Look at the facts. Every group went in different directions and did totally different things. But here we are on Marglot, all of us."

  "Not all of us." Ben spoke softly. "Lara isn't here. That was my fault."

  "No." Darya turned to him. "It was my fault. I was the one who insisted on going to Iceworld."

  Rebka said, "It was Lara's own fault—she deliberately disobeyed Ben's order. Anyway, we've already been over that ten times. We have to focus on today. How did it happen that we all arrived here, like magic?"

  "Just like magic." Nenda snorted. "Let me tell you somethin'. When I was younger and even dumber than I am now, I wasted lots of time in the Eyecatch Gallery on Scordato. I studied the gamblin' games, an' finally I found one I liked. I watched it played, figured I couldn't lose. Twenty buttons, and twenty different colors that could come up on a screen. The color for any button changed randomly with each play. You paid for ten tries. If on any try you pressed your button and the screen came up yellow, you were sunk—out of the game. Otherwise you kept goin'. Make it all the way, an' you won double your original stake. I worked out the odds. You had nineteen chances out of twenty that you'd make it through any one try, so you had nearly a six out of ten chance—Tally will confirm this—of makin' it through all ten. That was better than evens of winnin'. So I paid my stake, an' I played. I hit green and purple and orange and black, all the way through to my tenth play. Then I pushed a button one last time, an' the screen came up yellow. What I hadn't known was that the game was rigged. If you made it as far as the tenth play, you got yellow no matter what button you pushed."

  The others stared at Nenda as though he had switched to some alien language, until Hans Rebka said, "Like the system we found ourselves in when we reached the Sag Arm. It was rigged. No matter what route you took from the Pride of Orion, or what method you tried, the screen finally came up yellow—you were shipped here."

  Nenda added, "All roads lead to Marglot. I bet there's a thousand more buttons in that system that nobody tried. Me an' At, we did it the hard way. Off through the Bose Network to Pleasureworld, then all the way to Pompadour. But we didn't need to. We could have closed our eyes, pushed any button, and finished up in a transport vortex that would bring us here."

  "Here," Darya Lang said, "where the animals are already dead. Here, where all other life on the planet is going to die. If Tally and Atvar H'sial are correct, here is a place where everything is doomed, even the sun itself. Why bring us here, just so we can die?" She turned to Nenda. "You say you and Atvar H'sial are the stupid ones, but you came here in a ship. And the reason you have that ship is because you didn't arrive using a transport vortex. If it weren't for you, we would have no way to escape."

  "Minor correction. It's a pinnace, not a ship. An' with all you lot"—Nenda counted—"we'd never cram you in. Even if we piled you three deep, we wouldn't get off the ground. Either it's half a dozen trips to orbit, which would really be pushing the pinnace, or else the Have-It-All has to come down. Which I hate like hell to do, because that's my last card."

  "But if E.C. Tally is right, we will be forced to seek such an escape. And yet—and yet—" Julian Graves sat with his hand hooding his eyes. "Logic is not my strong point, but I am confused. The Builders brought us here. I accept that. I can even accept that they were not aware of our mortal weakness, and expected that we would find a way to survive. But why not bring us here directly? Why have us travel first to a dead system?"

  Darya said, "So we could see it. Would you ever have believed that a stellar system could die like that, if you hadn't been there and seen it for yourself? I wouldn't. The Builders wanted us to know that a whole system could die, before we were brought to one that is dying."

  "But if the Builders destroyed the other system—" Teri Dahl began.

  "They didn't. It was the others—the Destroyers—who did it."

  "The Destroyers, the Voiders," Torran Veck said. "Sure. If everything doesn't work out with one race of super-beings, invent another. Professor Lang, if you can't make sense—"

  "Save the bickering for later." Julian Graves cut him off. "I make no claims as to my performance, which has so far been pathetic; but I am still the leader of this expedition. It is my conclusion that Professor Lang is right. We were brought to the Sag Arm for a purpose. That purpose is to see what has happened, to understand what can happen, and to take that knowledge back with us to the Orion Arm. Whatever causes this, we must find a way to stop it—not only for the sake of beings in this arm, for our own home clades." He turned to Nenda. "I am assuming that the Have-It-All is still somewhere in orbit?"

  "Sure it is. One yell from me and J'merlia can bring it here. But I won't do that 'til we have to, because the Have-It-All is my only ticket home."

  "That is a policy both wise and practical. Also, we should learn as much as possible before we leave Marglot. However, for my own peace of mind I would like you to do one thing. Please contact your crew on the Have-It-All and confirm that they are in a position to land here on Marglot, if necessary at short notice."

  "I'll do it—though I'll tell you right now, the idea of this lot clutterin' up the inside of my ship don't exactly thrill me. I'll call from the pinnace. It has better transmission equipment than the suits, an' there are channels that Kallik will be sure to have open. Take me a few minutes."

  He moved to the multiple overlapping leaf layers that formed the wall of the cone-house. As he pulled the inner layer aside, Hans Rebka was somehow standing next to him.

  Nenda paused with his hand on the side of the leaf. He said, softly enough so that Rebka alone could hear, "I don't remember anybody invitin' you."

  "I invited myself." Rebka motioned Nenda to continue beyond the inner layer. When they were standing in the narrow space between the leaves, he went on, "Look, I know what I think of you, and I can guess that you don't think any better of me. But we are both realists. Like it or not, Julian Graves is in charge of this expedition and the others will do what he says."

  "Yeah. Old numb-nuts, the Ethical Councilor. He never met an alien he didn't like, even when it was tryin' to kill him."

  "I don't think anyone but you and me realizes how much danger we could be in—maybe Atvar H'sial, because the two of you seem to be on the same wavelength. Anyway, I've got an itch inside that I can't scratch, and it feels like trouble."

  "Yeah. But we don't know when an' how." Nenda whistled through his teeth. "All right. I hate to say
this, but I'll go along. We work together, 'til we're out of this crappy place an' home in the Orion Arm. Then it's back to business as usual."

  "Some business there I can do without. I was twelve hours away from execution when an inter-clade councilor arrived to take me to Miranda. Now I feel like I'm waiting to be executed on Marglot." Rebka pushed his way through the remaining leaves until he was outside the cone-house. There he paused until Louis Nenda joined him. Rebka went on, "Seems like our worries are justified. What do you make of this?"

  The two men stared at the ground, then looked up to the clouded sky. Here at the Hot Pole, perpetually warmed by the hot gas-giant around which Marglot orbited, an impossible event was taking place.

  All around, large flakes of white drifted down.

  It was snowing.

  * * *

  "Want to go back an' tell 'em the news?" Nenda jerked his head toward the cone-house.

  "I think you should make your call to the Have-It-All first. Let's see what else we can learn."

  "Yeah. Graves will start cluckin' an' gibberin' if we go inside, but there's not a damn thing he can do."

  They began to walk side by side across the snow-covered ground. Hans guessed that it must have started at least an hour ago. A faint glow of dawn was touching the eastern horizon, and by its light the outline of the pinnace was visible ahead. An outline only, because already it stood covered with a thin layer of snow. Cone-houses, scattered all the way to the horizon, formed steep-sided pyramids of white.

  Their suits kept the men warm, but Hans confirmed from his monitor the large and sudden drop in temperature. Snow was sticking to everything, which meant that the air and ground could not be much below freezing.

  Make that, much below freezing yet. It was not over. The suit record showed a continuing decrease of a few degrees an hour.

  They had reached the pinnace, and Nenda slid one door open. He cursed as blown snow and snow from the roof fell on him and on the pilot's seat. "Claudius was right. We should have stayed on Pleasureworld." He waited until Hans Rebka had moved across to the passenger seat, then scrambled in after him. "If we had any sense, we'd take off now, and to hell with it. I know, I know, we can't—but Atvar H'sial would understand if we did."

  He went to work at the communications console. "Hope this funny weather don't mess up signals."

  "Are you sure they'll be listening?"

  "You kiddin'? I've seen better, but this will do."

  A grainy image of Kallik had appeared on the pinnace's central display.

  "Master Nenda! And Captain Rebka also!" The Hymenopt was hopping up and down in excitement. "We had been wondering and worrying."

  "Worryin' why?"

  "Marglot is changing. During our first orbits, one hemisphere was warm and one was ice-coated. Now we see clouds everywhere—snow clouds, from their appearance—and there is evidence of tremendous winds blowing between the cold and warm sides."

  "No need to worry about us. We're near the Hot Pole—or what used to be the Hot Pole. It's snowin' here, too."

  "Just as predicted, from what Archimedes discovered."

  "Archimedes? He don't have the brain to predict anythin'. Is there some way he could see what was happenin' down here, even through the cloud layer."

  "Not at all. As observations of Marglot became less relevant because of clouds, J'merlia and I assigned to him a different task. We suggested that he use the aft chamber to study the planet M-2, and see what might be learned there."

  "Kallik, you two were just tryin' to keep Archie out of your hair an' out of the control room. You know there's no life on M-2, never was and never will be."

  "That is true. But Archimedes came back to us almost at once. He asserted that rapid and inexplicable changes were taking place on M-2. He wondered if we could tell him what was happening."

  "Of course, we could not." J'merlia had crowded in next to Kallik. "Where is Atvar H'sial?"

  "She's doin' fine. Get on with it."

  "Of course. We had no hope of visual data better than those provided by the superior sight of Archimedes." J'merlia rolled his lemon-colored compound eyes on their short eyestalks. "But even we could remark evidence of vast changes. However, it was not until we employed other sensors that the overall situation became clear to us. When we arrived in this system, the average temperature of the gas-giant M-2 was eight hundred degrees. Now, hard to believe, it emits negligible thermal radiation. Our bolometers register a surface as cold as liquid nitrogen."

  "Which sure as hell sounds like bad news for Marglot." Nenda turned to Hans Rebka. "Liquid nitrogen?"

  "Seventy-seven degrees absolute. It will take a while for the surface here to go that far, because the inside of the planet must have plenty of stored heat. But long before that, you and I and everyone else on Marglot will be—what are you doing?"

  Nenda had reached out to the controls and flipped a switch.

  "Turnin' off all communications. You were going to say we would be dead, weren't you? If Kallik and J'merlia think that At and me will get killed, they'll go right off their heads. Leave this to me." He switched the channel back on. "J'merlia, is the Have-It-All ready to fly re-entry?"

  "Of course. It has been perfectly prepared for that, ever since the moment of your departure."

  "Good. D'you know where we are, from our suit beacons?"

  "Precisely where you are."

  "Then I want the Have-It-All down here, quick as you can do it—but fly careful."

  "Certainly. It will be as you command. We will fly fast, and we will fly carefully, and we will fly with joy."

  Kallik added, "Master Nenda, it will be a pleasure and a privilege to come to Marglot and see you again. We have so missed—"

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Nenda switched off the channel. "You can't afford to get Kallik an' J'merlia get goin' on the grovellin', or there's no stoppin' 'em."

  "How long do you think it will be before the Have-It-All arrives here?"

  "At least a few hours. I told 'em, they've gotta be careful. J'merlia's a hell of a pilot, but he knows that Atvar H'sial will pull off his legs an' use 'em as backscratchers if he damages my ship." Nenda stared out of the window, where the wind was stronger and snow was driving almost horizontally. "Gettin' a bit nasty out there. Anythin' more that needs to be said to the Have-It-All?"

  "Will there be medical supplies for Ben Blesh?"

  "Sure. An' the best robodoc that money can buy."

  "Then I think that's it. I'm ready when you are."

  "I'm not ready at all. But we might as well go." Nenda swung the door open, and had to shout above the sudden howl of the wind, "Back to the cone-house. Who wants to be the one gives the others the good news?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Stranded on Marglot.

  Cold, yes. Snow, yes. With no warmth from M-2 and the sun a brilliant but far-distant ball, anyone would expect those. But who could have predicted such a wind? Certainly not Louis Nenda.

  On the leeward side of the cone-house the blast shrieked and howled around him. Despite conditions it could never before have experienced, the cone-house was standing up well. The great leaves ripped off one by one, but the central trunk held steady. That was just as well, because if the cone-house collapsed it would fall on Louis.

  The snow was now almost waist-deep. He dug and tunneled and carved himself a kind of bunker in it, not much protection but better than nothing; and better by far to be here than sitting listening to the brainless talk within the cone-house. Everyone except Hans Rebka and the silent Atvar H'sial talked and acted as though the game was over and they were all safe from danger. The Have-It-All would land, they would board it, and they would fly home to the Orion Arm using the same set of Bose nodes as Nenda had used to arrive here. They were idiots, all of them.

  Nenda looked at his suit monitor. Twenty below, and dropping. He had confided the truth to Hans Rebka.

  "No point in tellin' everybody yet, but the Have-It-All is a spaceship. Sure, it ca
n fly atmospheric, an' in any reasonable conditions it can take off to anywhere. But I'm not sure we'll see reasonable conditions. With ice loading all over the hull and drive efficiency down to maybe thirty percent, the mass that can be hoisted to orbit will be way down."

  "What about the Bose drive?"

  "Unaffected. But you can't use the Bose drive unless you're at a Bose node. It'd be a miracle if there was one on the surface of Marglot. Even if there is, we got no idea where it might be."

  "So what's your suggestion."

  "I don't have one. I'm goin' outside. If conditions are too bad, the Have-It-All may not be able to land at all."

  And how bad was too bad? Nenda again glanced at his suit monitor. Down to twenty-five below. Where the devil was the Have-It-All? Louis wasn't sure which worried him more: the idea that it was too windy to permit a landing, or the idea that J'merlia would attempt it no matter what and smash the ship to pieces.

  He knew what would happen, of course. J'merlia, with Kallik's enthusiastic support, would try for the landing no matter how impossible.

  He felt a sudden weight on his legs, and thought for a moment that part of the cone-house must have collapsed. He turned. It was Sinara Bellstock, wiping the snow from her faceplate and peering in through Louis's.

  "I was worried about you." She snuggled down beside him, half demolishing the shelter that had cost him a great deal of trouble to make. "Captain Rebka said that you had gone outside. You've been carrying a tremendous load ever since we left the Pride of Orion. And Torran Veck told a story from pre-space times, about a man who went out into the snow to die so that others of his party might be saved. I thought you might have—I was afraid you might have—but I should have known, you are too brave for that."

  It took Louis a moment to catch on. Who in his right mind would wander off outside, to die in the cold? Louis had heard about cases like that, and decided that in the old days there were even more lunatics around than there were today. Sinara, of course, was looking for a hero. Didn't she know that you were a real hero if you helped people to survive—especially yourself?