Sundiver

by David Brin

  On the walls she saw spiderweb tapestries of hanging gardens and of an alien city set on the edge of a mountain scarp. The city clung to the jagged cliff, shimmering as if viewed through a waterfall. Dr. Martine thought she could almost hear high pitched music, keening just above her aural range. Could that explain the shortness of her breath? Her jittery nerves?

  Bubbacub rose from a cushioned pallet to greet her. His gray fur shone as he waddled forward on stubby legs. In the actinic light and one point five g-field of his apartment, Bubbacub lost whatever “cuteness” Martine had seen in him before. The Pil’s bowlegged stance spoke strength.

  The alien’s mouth moved in short snaps. His voice, coming from the Vodor which hung from his neck, was smooth and resonant, although the words came clipped and separated. “Good. Glad you come.”

  Martine was relieved. The Library Representative sounded relaxed. She bowed slightly.

  “Greeting, Pil Bubbacub. I came to ask if you have had any further word from the Branch Library.”

  Bubbacub displayed a mouth full of needle sharp teeth. “Come in and sit. Yes, good that you ask. I have a new fact. But come. Have food, drink first.”

  Martine grimaced as she passed through the g-transition field of the threshold—always a disconcerting experience. Inside the room she felt as though she weighed seventy kilos.

  “No. Thank you, I just ate. I will sit.” She selected a chair built for humans and carefully lowered herself into it. Seventy kilos was more than a person should weight

  The Pil sprawled back on his cushion across from her, his ursine head barely above the level of his feet. He regarded her with small black eyes.

  “I have heard from La Paz by ma-ser. They say no thing on Sun Ghosts. No thing at all. It may not be se-man-tics at all. It may be the Branch is too small. It is small, small branch, as I saided. But some Hu-man Off-ic-ials will make much of the lack of a re-fer-ence.”

  Martine shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it. This will only go to show that too little effort has been ^pent on the Library project. A bigger branch, like my group has been lobbying for all along, would surely have had results.”

  “I sended for da-ta from Pil-a by time drop. There can be no con-fu-sion at a Main Branch!”

  “That’s good,” Martine nodded. “What’s bothering me, though, is what Dwayne is going to do during this delay. He’s bubbling over with half cracked notions about how to communicate with the Ghosts. I’m afraid that in his stumbling around down there, he’ll find some way of offending the psi-creatures so badly that all of the Library’s wisdom won’t patch things up. It’s vital that Earth have good relations with its nearest neighbors!”-

  Bubbacub raised his head slightly and placed a short arm behind it. “You are mak-ing ef-forts to cure Dr. Kep-ler?”

  “Of course,” she replied, stiffly. “Actually, I’m having trouble seeing how he escaped Probation all of this time. Dwayne’s mind is full of chaos, though I’ll admit his P-score is within the acceptance curves. He had a tachisto test on Earth.

  “I think I’ve got him pretty well stabilized, now. But what’s driving me crazy is trying to figure out what his basic problem is. His manic depressive swings resemble the ‘glare madness’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when society was almost wrecked by the psychic effects of environmental noise. It nearly tore apart industrial culture when it was at its peak and led to the period of repression people today euphemistically call ‘the Bureaucracy.”

  “Yes. I have readed of your race-es at-tempt at sui-cide. It seem to me that the time af-ter, of which you just spoke, was time of order and peace. But that not my af-fair. You are luck-y to be in-comp-e-tent even at sui-cide.

  “But do not stray. What of Kep-ler?”

  The Pil’s voice did not rise at the end of his question, but there was something he did with his snout . . . a curling of the folds that served instead of lips . . . that told when he was asking, no, demanding an answer. It sent a shiver down Dr. Martine’s spine.

  He’s so arrogant, she thought. And everyone else seems to think it’s just a quirk of personality. Can they be blind to the power and the threat that this creature’s presence on Earth represents?

  In their culture shock, they see a little manlike bear. Cute, even! Are my boss and his friends on the Confederacy Council the only ones who recognize a demon from outer space when they see one?

  And somehow it’s up to me to find out what it will take to propitiate the demon, while I keep Dwayne from shooting off his mouth, and try to be the one to come up with a sensible way to contact the Sun Ghosts! Ifni, help your sister!

  Bubbacub was still waiting for an answer.

  “W-well, I do know that Dwayne is determined to crack the Sun Ghost’s secret without extraterrestrial help. Some of his crew are downright radical about it. I won’t go so far as to say that any of them are Skins, but their pride is running pretty stiff.”

  “Can you keep him from do-ing rash things?” Bubbacub said. “He has broughted in ran-dom el-ements.”

  “Like inviting Fagin and his friend Demwa? They seem to be harmless. Demwa’s experience with dolphins gives him a distant but plausible chance to be useful. And Fagin has a knack for getting along with alien races. The important thing is that Dwayne has someone to spill out his paranoid fantasies to. I’ll talk to Demwa and ask him to be sympathetic.”

  Bubbacub sat up in a momentary writhing of arms and legs. He settled into a new position and looked straight into Martine’s eyes.

  “I do not care about them. Fa-gin is a pass-ive ro-man-tic. Dem-wa looks like a fool. Like any friend of Fa-gin’s.

  “No, I care more a-bout the two who now cause troub-le on the base. 1 did not know, when I came, that there was a chimp here who was made part of the staff. He and the journ-al-ist have been all claws since we hit dirt. The journ-al-ist is snubbed by the base crew and he makes lot of noise. And the Chimp keeps at Cul-la all time . . . trying to ‘lib-er-ate’ him, so. . .”

  “Has Culla been disobedient? I thought his indenture was only . . .”

  Bubbacub leapt from his seat, pointy teeth bared in a hiss.

  “Do not interrupt, human!” Bubbacub’s real voice became audible for the first time in Martine’s memory, a high pitched squeak above the roar of the Vodor that hurt her ears.

  For a moment, Martine was too stunned to move.

  Bubbacub’s taut stance began to relax by degrees. In a minute the stiff brush of fur was almost smooth again.

  “I apo-log-ize, human-Mar-tine. I should not fluff-up to such minor breach by one of mere in-fant race.”

  Martine let her breath out, trying not to make a sound.

  Bubbacub sat once again. “To answer your question, no, Cul-la not out of place. He does know his species will be in-den-tured to mine by Paren-tal right for long time.

  “Still, it bad that this Doc-tor Jeff-rey does push this myth of rights with-out duties. You humans must learn to keep your pets in line, for it on-ly by good grace of we old ones that they are called cli-ent soph-onts at all.

  “And if they not be sophonts, where would you be, hu-man?”

  Bubbacub’s teeth shone brightly-for a moment then he closed his mouth with a snap.

  Martine felt very dry in the throat. She chose her words carefully. “I’m sorry about any offense you may have taken, Pil Bubbacub. I will speak to Dwayne and maybe he can get Jeffrey to ease off.”

  “And the journ-al-ist?”

  “Yes, I’ll talk to Pierre also. I’m sure he doesn’t mean any harm. He won’t cause any more trouble.”

  “That would be well,” Bubbacub’s voicebox said softly. He allowed his stocky body to settle once more into a slouch.

  “We have great com-mon goals, you and I. I hope we can work as one. But know this: our means may dif-fer. Please do what you can or I be forced to, as you say, kill two birds with one stone.”

  Martine nodded again, weakly.

  8. REFLECTION

>   Jacob let his mind wander as LaRoque launched into one of his expositions. At any rate, the little man was now more interested in impressing Fagin than in winning any points with Jacob. Jacob wondered if it would be sinful anthropomorphizing to pity the E.T. for having to listen.

  The three rode in a small car that moved through tunnels laterally as well as up and down. Two of Fagin’s root-pods gripped a low rail that ran a few centimeters off the floor. The two humans held onto another that circuited the car higher up.

  Jacob listened with half an ear as the car glided on. LaRoque still bearded a topic he started back aboard the Bradbury: that the missing Patrons of Earth . . . those mythical beings who supposedly began the Uplift of man thousands of years ago, and then gave it up halfway finished . . . were somehow associated with the Sun. LaRoque thought the Sun Ghosts themselves might be that race.

  “Then you have all of the references in the religions of Earth. Almost in every one the Sun is something holy! It is one of the common threads that runs through all cultures!”

  LaRoque made an expansive gesture with his arms, as if to encompass the scope of his idea.

  “It makes so much sense,” he said. “It would also explain why it is so difficult for the Library to trace our ancestry. Surely solar-type races have been known before. . . . That is why this ‘research’ is so stupid. But they are undoubtedly rare and no one has yet thought to feed the Library this correlation which could solve two problems at once!”

  The trouble was that the idea was so damned hard to refute. Jacob sighed inwardly. Of course many primitive Earth civilizations once had Sun cults. The Sun was so obviously the source of heat and light and life, a thing of miraculous power! It must be a common stage for a primitive people to pass through, to see animate properties in their star.

  And there was the problem. The galaxy had few “primitive peoples” to compare to the human experience; mostly animals, pre-sentient hunter-gatherers (or analogous types), and fully uplifted sophont races. Hardly ever did an “in-between” case like man show up—apparently abandoned by its patron without the training to make its new sapiency work.

  In such rare cases the newly potent minds were known to burst free of their ecological niche. They invented strange mockeries of science—bizarre rules of cause and effect, superstition and myth. Without the guiding hand of a patron, such “wolfling” races seldom lasted long. Humanity’s current notoriety was partly due to its survival.

  The very lack of any other species with similar experience to compare with made generalizations easy to form and hard to refute. Since there were no other examples of species-wide indulgence in Sun-worship known to the small Branch in La Paz. LaRoque could maintain that those traditions of humanity recalled the Uplift that was never finished.

  Jacob half listened for a moment longer just in case LaRoque said anything new. But mostly he let his mind drift.

  It had been a long two days since the landing. He had had to get used to traversing from parts of the base that were gravity tuned to others in which the feathery pull of Mercury prevailed. There were many introductions to Base personnel, most of whose names he immediately forgot. Then Kepler had assigned someone to take him to his quarters.

  The chief physician at Hermes Base turned out to be a Dolphin-Uplift bug. He was only too happy to examine Kepler’s prescriptions, expressing mystification that there were so many. Afterwards he insisted on throwing a party at which everyone in the medical department, it seemed, wanted to ask questions about Makakai. Between toasts, that is. For that matter there weren’t all that many questions after all.

  Jacob’s mind moved a little slowly as the car came to rest and the doors slid open to the huge underground cavern where the Sunships were serviced and stored. Then, for a fleeting moment, it seemed that space itself was bending out of shape, and, worse yet, there was two of everybody!

  The opposite wall of the Cavern seemed to bulge forward, up to a rounded bulb only a few meters away, directly across from him. There, where it was closest, stood a Kanten two and a half meters high, a small red-faced human, and a tall, stocky, dark complexioned man who stared back at him with one of the stupidest expressions he’d ever seen.

  Jacob suddenly realized that he was looking at the hull of a Sunship, the most perfect mirror in the solar system. The amazed man opposite him, with the obvious hangover, was his own reflection.

  The twenty-meter spherical ship was so good a mirror that it was difficult to define its shape. Only by noting the sharp discontinuity of the edge and the way reflected images swept away in an arc could he focus his eyes on something to be interpreted as a real object at all.

  “Very pretty,” LaRoque admitted grudgingly. “Lovely, brave, misguided crystal.” He lifted his tiny camera-recorder and scanned it left to right.

  “Most impressive,” Fagin added.

  Yeah, Jacob thought. And big as houses, also.

  Large as the ship was, the Cavern made it seem insignificant. The rough, rocky ceiling arched high overhead, disappearing in a misty fog of condensation.

  Where they stood it was rather narrow, but it stretched to the right for a kilometer, at least, before curving out of sight.

  .They stood on a platform which brought them even with the equator of the ship, above the working floor of the hangar. A small crowd stood down below, dwarfed by the silvery sphere.

  Two hundred meters to the left stood a pair of massive vacuum doors, easily a hundred and fifty meters broad. Those, Jacob supposed, were part of the airlock that led, by tunnel, to the unfriendly surface of Mercury, where the giant interplanetary ships, such as the Bradbury, rested in huge natural caves.

  A ramp led down from the platform to the cavern floor below. At the bottom Kepler spoke with three men in overalls. Culla stood not far away. His companion was a well-dressed chimpanzee who sported a monocle and stood on a chair to get even with Culla’s eyes.

  The chimp jumped up and down with flexed knees and set the chair shivering. He tapped furiously at an instrument on his chest. The Pring diplomat watched with an expression that Jacob had learned to interpret as one of friendly respect. But there was something else in Culla’s stance that surprised him . . . an indolence, a looseness of posture, before the chimpanzee, that he had never seen the E.T. display in talking to a human or Kanten or Cynthian or, especially, a Pil.

  Kepler greeted Fagin first then turned to Jacob.

  “Glad you could make the tour, Mr. Demwa.” Kepler shook his hand with a firmness that surprised Jacob, then called the chimpanzee over to his side.

  “This is Dr. Jeffrey, the first of his species to become a full member of a space research team, and one helluva fine worker. It’s his ship that we’ll be touring.” ‘

  Jeffrey smiled with the wry, unhinged grin characteristic of the superchimp species. Two centuries of genetic engineering had wrought changes in the skull and pelvic arch, changes modeled on the human form, as it was the easiest to duplicate. He looked like a very fuzzy, short brown man with long arms and huge buck teeth.

  Another bit of engineering became evident when Jacob shook his hand. The chimpanzee’s fully opposable thumb pressed hard, as if to remind Jacob that it was there, the Mark of a man.

  Where Bubbacub carried his Vodor, Jeffrey wore a device with black horizontal keys left and right. In the middle was a blank screen about twenty centimeters by ten.

  The superchimp bowed and his fingers flew over the keys. Bright letters appeared on the screen.

  I AM HAPPY TO MEET YOU. DOCTOR KEPLER TELLS ME YOU’RE ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS.

  Jacob laughed. “Well thanks a lot, Jeff. I try to be, though I still don’t know what it is I’m going to be asked to do!”

  Jeffrey gave the familiar shrieking chimpanzee laugh; then, for the first time, he spoke. “You will find out ssooon!”

  It was almost a croak, but Jacob was amazed. Speech was still almost impossibly painful for this generation of superchimp, but Jeff’s words came out very clear.
<
br />   “Dr. Jeffrey will take this, our newest Sunship, out on a dive shortly after we finish our tour,” Kepler said. “Just as soon as Commandant deSilva returns from reconnaissance in our other ship.

  “I'm sorry the Commandant wasn’t here to meet us. when we arrived on the Bradbury. And now it seems that Jeff will be gone while we hold our briefings. It’ll add a dramatic touch, though, to get his first report just about the time we finish tomorrow afternoon.”

  Kepler started to turn toward the ship. “Any introductions I’ve forgotten? Jeff, I know you’ve met Kant Fagin earlier. Pil Bubbacub appears to have declined our invitation. Have you met Mr. LaRoque?”

  The chimp’s lips curled back in an expression of disgust. He snorted once and turned away to look at his own reflection in the Sunship.

  LaRoque glared with hot-faced embarrassment.

  Jacob had to hold back a laugh. No wonder the superchimps were called chips! For once, someone with less tact than LaRoque! The encounter between the two in the Refectory last night was already legend. He was sorry he’d missed it.

  Culla laid a slender, six-fingered hand on Jeffrey’s sleeve. “Come, Friend-Jeffrey. Let ush show Mishter Demwa and hish friends your ship.” The chimp glanced sullenly at LaRoque then looked back at Culla and Jacob, and broke into a wide grin. He took one of Jacob’s hands and one of Culla’s and pulled them toward the entrance to the ship.

  When the party reached the top of the other ramp they came to a short bridge that crossed a gap into the interior of the mirrored globe. It took a moment for Jacob’s eyes to adjust to the dark. Then he saw a flat deck which stretched from one end of the ship to the other.

  It floated, a circular disk of dark springy material, at the equator of the ship. The only breaks in the flat surface were a half dozen or so acceleration couches, set flush with the deck at intervals around its perimeter, some with modest instrument panels, and a dome of seven meters diameter at the exact center.

  Kepler knelt by a control panel and touched a switch. The wall of the ship became semi-transparent. Dimly, light from the cavern came in from all sides to illuminate the interior. Kepler explained that interior lighting was kept to a minimum to prevent internal reflections along the inner surface of the spherical shell, which might confuse both equipment and crew.