Transcendence hu-3 Read online

  Transcendence

  ( Heritage Universe - 3 )

  Charles Sheffield

  The search for the legendary Builders results in the reemergence of an ancient race of galactic marauders who must be stopped before they reconquer the world in this sequel to Summertide and Divergence.

  Transcendence

  by Charles Sheffield

  Chapter One: Sentinel Gate

  The Builder artifact known as Paradox lies deep in Fourth Alliance territory (Bose Access Node, G-232). The fact that Paradox contains a Lotus field has been known for almost three thousand years, since the Ruttledge expedition of E.1379 (Reference: Parzen, E.1383). Although such a field destroys both organic and inorganic memories, it does not invariably inhibit the passage of electrical signals along a neural cable conductor. At least one counter-example is known. (Reference:…

  Reference?

  Darya Lang’s hands hovered over the input coder, while she stared at the display in total frustration. What could she write next? It was a point of pride with her that the entries in the Lang Universal Artifact Catalog (Fifth Edition) be as accurate and up-to-date as possible. It was not her fault that some of her recent proposed entries were being criticized because of the ignorance of other editors. She knew, even if they did not, that in certain circumstances an electrical signal could travel along a neural cable from inside a Lotus field to a computer outside. Although she had not seen it herself, she had the word of the councilor who had observed it, and councilors did not lie.

  Not to mention the word of the embodied computer, E. Crimson Tally, to whom it had actually happened.

  She chewed at her bottom lip, and at last made the entry.

  Reference: private communication, Councilor Julius Graves.

  It was the best that she could do, a far cry from the usual form of academic references that Professor Merada would consider satisfactory. But in this case, the less said, the better. If Darya were to add that the cited incident with the Lotus field had taken place on an artificial planetoid known as Glister, just before Graves and Tally and Darya herself had been thrown thirty thousand light-years out of the spiral arm by a Builder transportation system, to a location where they had encountered… well, don’t go any further. Merada would just lose his mind. Or more likely tell Darya that she was losing hers.

  Maybe she was — but not for that reason.

  It was late in the evening, and Darya had been working outside in the quiet of a little leafy bower. The calm air of Sentinel Gate was filled with the perfume of the planet’s night-scented flowers and the faint cooing of nesting birds. Now she stood up from the terminal and moved to push the vines aside.

  She knew exactly where to look: east, to where Sentinel itself was rising. Two hundred million kilometers away and almost a million across, that shining and striated sphere dominated the moonless night sky. Since childhood, it and the mystery of the Builder artifacts had also dominated Darya’s thinking. She would be the first to admit that it had shaped her whole life.

  And the artifacts shaped her life still — but in a quite different way. Darya stared at Sentinel, as she had stared at it a thousand times before, and marveled at how much she had changed in so short a time. One year ago she had been a dedicated research scientist who asked nothing more than her library and her work, cataloging and analyzing data on the thousand-plus Builder artifacts scattered around the spiral arm. The discovery of a statistical anomaly involving all the artifacts had persuaded her to leave her quiet study on Sentinel Gate, and travel from the civilized region of the Fourth Alliance to the rough outpost worlds of Quake and Opal.

  There she had found her anomaly — and more. She had found danger, excitement, despair, terror, pain, exhilaration, and companionship. Half-a-dozen times she had been close to death. And returning at last to Sentinel Gate, the place she had longed for so hard and so long, she had found something else. She had found herself to be — to be—

  Darya stared at Sentinel, and struggled to admit the truth.

  To be bored.

  Incredible, but that was the only word for it. The life of a successful archeo-scientist, once so rich and satisfying, was no longer enough.

  It was easy to see why. The disappearance of the Builders from the spiral arm five million years ago had provided for Darya the most fascinating mystery imaginable. She could think of nothing more interesting than exploring the artifacts left behind by the long-vanished race, seeking to understand them and perhaps to learn where the Builders had gone, and why.

  Nothing more interesting, that is, so long as the Builders remained vanished. But once one had met constructs who explained that they were the Builders’ own representatives, who still served the Builders’ interests… why, then the past became irrelevant. What mattered was the present and the future, with the possibility of encountering and studying the Builders themselves. Even the most interesting parts of her old life, including her cherished catalog of artifacts, could not compete.

  Darya’s communication terminal was sending a soft piping sound in her direction. She walked back to it in no particular hurry. It was going to be Professor Merada — these days it was always Professor Merada, at any hour of the day or night.

  His serious, heavy-browed face had already appeared on the screen, overwriting her catalog inputs.

  “Professor Lang.” He began to speak as soon as she came into his field of view. “Concerning the proposed entry on the Phages.”

  “Yes?” Darya had an idea what was coming.

  “It states here — I quote — ‘although Phages are generally considered to be slow-moving free-space forms, shunning all forms of gravity field, there are exceptions. In certain circumstances Phages may be induced to move into a gravity field, and move with considerable speed.’ Professor Lang, I assume that you wrote those words.”

  “Correct. I wrote them.”

  “Then what is your authority for the statement? You quote none.”

  Darya swore at herself. Even when she had made that addition to the Phage entry, she had known it would cause trouble. It was the old problem: Should she parrot conventional wisdom on the Phages and the Builder artifacts? Or should she tell what she knew to be the truth, even though it could not be supported by anything but her own word and that of a few other people in her party? She had seen Phages, moving far faster than any Phage was supposed to be able to move, dive-bombing the ship she herself rode in. Others had seen those same Phages — supposedly indestructible — smashed into fragments on the surface of a high-field planetoid.

  She felt angry with Merada, and knew she had no right to. He was doing exactly what a conscientious and first-rate scientist should do — what Darya herself would have done one year ago: ruling out hearsay and shoddy research, by insisting on complete documentation.

  “I will send you a reference, as soon as I have approval to release it.”

  “Make it soon, Professor Lang. The official closing date for changes to the catalog is already past. Are you sure that you will be able to obtain approval?”

  “I’ll do my best.” Darya nodded to indicate that the conversation was over and moved away from the terminal. Merada assumed that the approval she referred to was no more than the consent of another researcher to make known a preliminary finding, perhaps in advance of official publication. The truth was insanely more complex. Approval for this information would have to come from the whole interclade Council.

  She had moved no more than half-a-dozen steps when the communications terminal issued another soft whistle. Darya sighed and turned back. Persistence was a prime virtue in any research worker; but sometimes Merada took it to extremes.

  “Yes, Professor?” She spoke without looking at the screen.
r />   “Darya?” a faint voice queried. “Is that you?”

  Darya gasped and stared at the terminal, but all it offered was the white-noise display of a sound-only link.

  “Hans? Hans Rebka? Where are you? Are you on Miranda?”

  “Not any more.” The tone was faint and distorted, but even so the bitterness could be heard in it. “There was no point in staying. The Council wouldn’t even listen. I’m at the final Bose Network node before Sentinel Gate. I can’t talk now. Expect me on Sentinel Gate in half a day.”

  The space-thinned voice faded and the connection was abruptly broken. Darya walked forward to the easy chair in front of the terminal and collapsed into it. She sat staring at nothing.

  The Council did not believe them. Incredible. That meant that it had rejected the sworn statements of one of its own Council members; and of the embodied computer, E.C. Tally, who did not know how to lie; and of Hans Rebka, recognized as one of the most experienced and canny troubleshooters in the whole spiral arm.

  Darya roused herself. She ought to call Professor Merada and tell him that many of the references that she wanted to cite had been dismissed by the highest authority in the spiral arm. What the Council did not accept, no one else would consider reliable. But she did not move. The Council rejection was certainly bad news, since it meant that nothing that she, or anyone else in their party, said about the events of the past year would have credibility.

  But what the rejection implied was far worse, the worst news of all: Zardalu were at large in the spiral arm — and no one in authority believed it.

  Chapter Two

  “Allow me to introduce Captain Hans Rebka.”

  Darya had steeled herself for the looks she would receive when Hans was ushered into the institute’s dining room. Even so, they were hard to take.

  “Captain Rebka is a native of Teufel, in the Phemus Circle,” she went on, “although most recently he has been on Miranda.”

  The score of research workers sitting at the long table were doing their best not to stare — and failing. Darya could easily put herself in their shoes. They saw a small, thin man in his late thirties, dressed in a patched and dingy uniform. His head appeared a fraction too big for his body, and his bony face was disfigured by a dozen scars, the most noticeable of them running in a double line from his left temple to the point of his jaw.

  Darya knew how her colleagues were feeling. She had experienced an identical reaction when she first met Hans Rebka. Courage and skill were invisible; it took time to learn that he had both.

  She glanced down the table. Professor Merada had made one of his rare excursions from the den of his study to the senior dining room, while across from him at the far end Carmina Gold sat peering thoughtfully at her fingernails. Darya knew both of them well, and fully appreciated what they could do. If someone was needed to perform an excruciatingly detailed and encyclopedic survey of any element of spiral arm history, flagging every tiny inconsistency of data or missing reference, then the thoughtful, humorless Merada could not be surpassed; if someone was needed who could follow and tease out the most convoluted train of logic, simplify it to essentials, and present so that a child — or a councilor! — could grasp it, then Carmina Gold, moody and childish herself, was the absolute best.

  But if you found yourself in deep trouble, without any hope of escape and so close to Death that you could smell his breath in your own terrified sweat… well, then you closed your eyes tight and prayed for Hans Rebka.

  But none of that showed. To the eye of anyone from a rich world of the Fourth Alliance, the newcomer was nothing but an ill-dressed hick from the back of nowhere. He fitted not at all into the genteel, leisurely, and cultured frame of an Institute dinner.

  The others at the table were at least making an effort at politeness.

  “You were recently on Miranda?” the woman next to Rebka said as he sat down. She was Glenna Omar, one of the senior information-systems specialists and in Darya’s view quite unnecessarily beautiful. “I’ve never been there, although I suppose that I should have, since it’s the headquarters for the Fourth Alliance. What did you think of Miranda, Captain?”

  Rebka stared blank-faced down at his plate while Darya, sitting opposite him, waited anxiously. If he was going to be rude or sullen or outrageous, here in her own home… there had been no time to brief him, only to give him a hug and a hurried greeting, after he had been decanted from the subluminal delivery craft and before the Immigration officials were ushering them into the dining room to meet her colleagues.

  “Paradise,” Rebka said suddenly. He turned to Glenna Omar and gave her an admiring smile packed with sexual overtones. “I’m from Teufel, of course, where the best road you can find is said to be any road that takes you somewhere else; so some might argue that I’m easily impressed. But I thought that Miranda was wonderful, my idea of paradise — until I landed here on Sentinel Gate, and learned that I was wrong. This has to be the most beautiful planet in the whole Fourth Alliance — in the whole spiral arm.”

  Darya took a deep breath and relaxed — for half a second. Hans was on his best behavior, but Glenna Omar’s response was a good deal too warm.

  “Oh, you’re just being nice to us, Captain,” she was saying. “Of course, I’ve never been to any of the worlds of your Phemus Circle, either. How would you describe them to me?”

  Dingy, dirty, dismal, and dangerous, Darya thought. Remote, impoverished, brutish, backward, and barbaric. And all the men are sex-mad.

  “I haven’t been to all the worlds of the Phemus Circle,” Rebka was replying. “But I can tell you what they say in the Circle about my home world, Teufel: ‘What sins must a man commit, in how many past lives, to be born on Teufel?’ ”

  “Oh, come now. It can’t really be that bad.”

  “It’s worse.”

  “The most awful planet in the whole Phemus Circle?”

  “I never said that. Scaldworld is probably as bad, and people from Styx say that they go to Teufel for vacations.”

  “Now I’m sure you’re joking. If the whole Phemus Circle is as horrible as you say, no one would stay there. What job do you have, when you’re back home?”

  “I guess you could call me a traveling troubleshooter. One thing the Phemus Circle is never short of, that’s trouble. That’s how Professor Lang” — he nodded to Darya — “and I met. We ran into a spot of bother together on Quake, one component of a double planet in the Mandel system.”

  “And she brought you back here, to the Fourth Alliance? Wise Darya.” But Glenna did not take her eyes off Rebka.

  “Not right away.” Rebka paused, with an expression on his face that Darya recognized. He was about to take some major step. “We did a few other things first. We and a few others — humans and aliens, plus an Alliance councilor and an embodied computer — went to one of the Mandel system’s gas-giant planets, Gargantua, where we found an artificial planetoid. We flew through a bunch of wild Phages to get there, and rescued some of us from a Lotus field. Then a sentient Builder construct put our party through a Builder transportation system, thirty thousand light-years out of the spiral arm, to a free-space extragalactic Builder facility called Serenity. When we arrived there, Professor Lang and I—”

  He was going to tell it all! Everything! All the facts that the whole party had agreed must remain dead secret until a high-level approval to discuss them had been granted. Darya tried to kick Rebka’s leg under the table and hit nothing but empty air.

  “We found a small group of Zardalu—” He was grinding on.

  “You mean, you found people from the territory of the Zardalu Communion?” Glenna Omar was smiling with delight. Darya was sure that she thought Rebka was making up the whole thing for her benefit.

  “No. I mean what I said. We found Zardalu, the original land-cephalopods.”

  “But they’ve been extinct for ten thousand years!”

  “Most have. But we found fourteen living ones—”

  “E
leven thousand years.” Merada’s high-pitched voice from the end of the table told Darya that everyone in the dining room was listening.

  Bang went a lifetime’s reputation for serious and sober research work! Darya kicked again at Rebka’s leg under the table, only to be rewarded with a pained and outraged cry from Glenna Omar.

  “Or rather more than eleven thousand,” Merada went on. “As nearly as I can judge, it has been eleven thousand four hundred and—”

  “ — Zardalu who had been held in a stasis field since the time of the Great Rising, when the rest of the species were killed off. But the ones we met were very much alive, and nasty—”

  “But this is disgraceful!” Carmina Gold had awakened from her dormouse trance and was scowling down the table at Darya. “You must know of the fearsome reputation of the Zardalu—”

  “Not just the reputation.” Darya gave up the attempt to stay out of it. “I know them from personal experience. They’re worse than their reputation.”

  “ — we managed to send them back to the spiral arm.” Rebka had his hand on Glenna Omar’s elbow and seemed to be ignoring the uproar rising from all parts of the long table. “And later we returned from Serenity ourselves, except for a Cecropian, Atvar H’sial, and an augmented Karelian human from the Zardalu Communion, Louis Nenda, who remained there to—”

  “ — a dating based on admittedly incomplete, subjective, and unreliable reference sources,” Merada said loudly, “such as Hymenopt race memories, and the files of—”

  “ — living Zardalu should certainly have been reported to the Alliance Council!” Carmina Gold was standing up. “At once. I will do it now, even if you will not.”

  “We already did that!” Darya stood up, too. Everyone seemed to be saying “Zardalu!” at once, and the group sounded like a swarm of angry bees. She did not think Carmina Gold could even hear her. “What do you think that Captain Rebka was doing on Miranda before he came here?” she shouted along the table. “Sunbathing?”