Transvergence Page 10

"A trifle warm, s'all." The Polypheme made a huge effort and managed to stand upright on his coiled tail, long enough for his top arm to reach out and snatch the coordinate sheet from Darya's hand. He slumped back, lifted the page to within two inches of his master eye, and stared at it vacantly. "Aha! Thirty-third lobe, Questen-Dwell branch. Know a really good way to get there. Do it in my sleep."

  Darya stepped back as he collapsed again on the floor in front of her. In his sleep? It seemed about the only way that Dulcimer could do it. But from somewhere the Polypheme was finding new reserves of coordination and energy. He wriggled his powerful tail and began to inch single-minded toward the main control chair.

  "Wait a minute." Darya hurried to stand behind him as he pulled himself up into the seat. "You're not proposing to fly the Erebus now."

  "Certainly am." The five arms were flying over the keyboards seemingly at random, pressing and flipping and pulling. "Have us inside the Anfract in half a minute."

  "But you're hot—you admit it yourself."

  "Little bit hot." The head turned to stare at Darya. The great slate-gray eye held hers for a second, then turned upward to fix its gaze solidly and vacantly on the featureless ceiling. The five hands moved in a blur across the board. "Just a little bit. When you're hot, you're hot. Little bit, little bit, little bit."

  "Somebody stop that lunatic!" Julian Graves cried. "Look at him! He's not fit to fly a kite."

  "Better if I'm hot, you see," Dulcimer said, throwing a final set of switches before Rebka and Nenda could get to him. " 'Cause this's a real bad trip we're taking, 'n I wouldn't dare do it if I was cold." The Erebus was moving, jerking into motion. "Littlebitlittlebitlittlebitlittle." Dulcimer went into a fit of the giggles, as the ship began a desperate all-over shaking.

  "Whooo-oo-ee. Here we go! All ab-b-oard, shipmates, and you all b-b-better hold on real t-t-t-t-t-t—"

  Chapter Eight

  When Darya Lang was a three-year-old child growing up on the garden world of Sentinel Gate, a robin made its nest on the outside ledge of her bedroom window. Darya told no one about it, but she looked each day at the three blue eggs, admiring their color, wishing she could touch their smooth shells, not quite realizing what they were . . .

  . . . until the magical morning when, while she was watching, the eggs hatched, all three of them. She sat frozen as the uniform blue ellipsoids, silent and featureless, gradually cracked open to reveal their fantastic contents. Three downy chicks struggled out, fluffy feathers drying and tiny beaks gaping. At last Darya could move. She ran downstairs, bubbling over with the need to tell someone about the miracle she had just witnessed.

  Her house-uncle Matra had pointed out to her the importance of what she had experienced: one could not judge something from its external appearance alone. That was as true for people as it was for things.

  And it also applied, apparently, to the Torvil Anfract.

  The references spoke of thirty-seven lobes. From outside, the eye and instruments confirmed them. But as the Erebus entered the Anfract and Darya's first panic subsided, she began to recognize a more complex interior, the filigree of detail superimposed on the gross externals.

  Dulcimer knew it already, or he had sensed it with some pilot's instinct denied to Darya. They had penetrated the Anfract along a spiraling path, down the center of a dark, starless tube of empty space. But then, when to Darya's eyes the path ahead lay most easy and open to them, the Polypheme slowed the ship to a cautious crawl.

  "Getting granular," said the croaking voice from the pilot's seat. "Easy does it."

  Easy did not do it. The ship was moving through vacuum, far from any material body, but it jerked and shuddered like a small boat on a choppy sea. Darya's first thought—that they were flying through a sea of small space-time singularities—made no sense. Impact with a singularity of any size would destroy the Erebus totally.

  She turned to Rebka, secured in the seat next to her. "What is it, Hans? I can't see anything."

  "Planck scale change—a big one. We're hitting the quantum level of the local continuum. If macroscopic quantum effects are common in the Anfract, we're due for all sorts of trouble. Quantum phenomena in everyday life. Don't know what that would do." He was staring at the screens and shaking his head. "But how in heaven did Dulcimer know it was coming? I have to admit it, Nenda was right—that Polypheme's the best, hot or cold. I'd hate to have to fly through this mess. And what the hell is that?"

  There was a curious groaning sound. The jerking had ended and the ship was speeding up again, rotating around its main axis like a rifle bullet. The groaning continued. It was the Chism Polypheme in the pilot's chair, singing to himself as he accelerated the Erebus—straight for the heart of a blazing blue-white star.

  Closer and closer. They could never turn in time. Darya screamed and grabbed for Hans Rebka. She tightened her arms around him. Dulcimer had killed them all.

  They were near enough to see the flaming hydrogen prominences and speckled faculae on the boiling surface. Nearer. One second more and they would enter the photosphere. Plunging—

  The sun vanished. The Erebus was in a dark void.

  Dulcimer crowed with triumph. "Multiply-connected! Riemann sheet of the fifth order—only one in the whole spiral arm. Love it! Wheeee! Here we go again."

  The blue-white star had popped into existence behind them and was rapidly shrinking in size, while they went spinning along another narrowing tube of darkness. There was a rapid series of stomach-wrenching turns and twists, and then all lights and power in the Erebus had gone and they were in free-fall. "Oops!" said the croaking voice in the darkness. "Hiatus. Sorry, folks—just when we were nearly there, too. This is a new one on me. I don't know how big it is. We just have to wait it out."

  There was total silence within the ship. Was it no more than a simple hiatus? Darya wondered. Suppose it went on forever? She could not help thinking about the stories of the Croquemort Time-well. The earlier twisting and spinning had affected her balance centers and her stomach, and now the free-fall and the darkness were making it worse. If it went on for much longer she felt sure that she would throw up. But to her relief it was only a couple of minutes before the screens flashed back to life, to show the Erebus moving quietly in orbit around a translucent and faintly glowing sphere. Wraiths of colored lights flickered and swirled within it. Occasionally they would vanish for brief moments and leave transparency; at other times the sphere became totally opaque.

  "And here we are," Dulcimer announced. "Right on schedule."

  Darya stared again at the displays. She was certainly not seeing the planet and moon that she and Kallik had proposed as Genizee, the Zardalu homeworld.

  "Here we are? Then where are we?" Louis Nenda said, asking Darya's question. He was in a seat behind her.

  "At our destination." The roller coaster through the twisted structure of the Anfract had done Dulcimer good. The Chism Polypheme sounded cheerful and proud and was no longer sagging in his seat. "There." He pointed with his middle arm to the main display. "That's it."

  "But that's not where we want to go," Darya protested.

  The great slaty eye rolled in her direction. "It may not be where you want to go, but it's the coordinates that you gave me. They lie right in the middle of that. Since I am opposed to all forms of danger, this is as close as I will take the ship."

  "But what is it?" Julian Graves asked.

  "What it looks like." Dulcimer sounded puzzled. "A set of annular singularities. Isn't that what you were all expecting?"

  It was not what anyone had been expecting. But now its existence made perfect sense.

  "The Anfract is tough to enter and hard to navigate around," Hans Rebka said. "But it has been done, many times, and ships came back to prove it. Yet not one of them reported finding a world like the sightings of Genizee made with high-powered equipment from outside the Anfract. So it stands to reason there has to be some other barrier that stops ships from finding and exploring Genizee. And a s
et of shielding singularities like this would do it. Enough to scare most people off."

  "Including us," Darya said. Space travel Rule #1: avoid major singularities; Rule #2: avoid all singularities.

  "No chance," Louis Nenda said. "Not after we dragged all this way."

  Darya stared at him. It was occurring to her, at the least convenient moment, that the reason why Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda got on so badly was not that they were fundamentally different. It was that they were fundamentally the same. Cocky, and competent, and convinced of their own immortality. "But if all those other ships came here and couldn't get in," she said, "then why should we be any different?"

  "Because we know something they didn't know," Rebka said. He and Nenda apparently enjoyed one other thing in common: cast-iron stomachs. The flight into the Anfract that had left Darya weak and nauseated had affected neither one of them.

  "The earlier ships didn't have a good reason to spend a lot of time here," he went on. "They didn't expect to find anything special inside, so they didn't do a systematic search for a way in. But we know there's something in there."

  "And if it's the Zardalu cladeworld," Louis Nenda added, "we also know there has to be a way in and a way out, and it can't be a too difficult way. All we have to do is find it."

  All we have to do.

  Sure. All we have to do is something no exploring ship ever did before. Darya added another item to the list of common characteristics of Rebka and Nenda: irrational optimism. But it made no difference what she thought—already they were getting down to details.

  "Can't take the Erebus," Rebka was saying. "That's our lifeline home."

  "And it can't even land," Nenda added. His glance at Julian Graves could not be missed.

  "On the first look that's no problem," Rebka said. "Let's agree to one thing, before we go any further: whatever and whoever goes, no one even thinks of landing. If there's planets down there, you take a good look from a safe distance. Then you come back here and report. As for whether the ship we use is the Indulgence or the seedship, I vote seedship—it's smaller and more agile." He paused. "And more expendable."

  "And talking of lifelines," Nenda added, "Atvar H'sial points out that even the Erebus is not much use without Dulcimer to pilot it. He ought to stay outside, too—"

  "He certainly ought," Dulcimer said. The Polypheme was rolling his eye nervously at the flickering sphere outside. He apparently did not like the look of it.

  "—so who flies the seedship and looks for a way in past the singularities?" Nenda finished.

  "I do," said Rebka.

  "But I am most expendable." J'merlia spoke for the first time since they entered the Anfract.

  "Kallik and I know the Anfract internal geometry best," Darya said.

  "But I can maintain the most detailed record of events," said E.C. Tally.

  Deadlock. Everyone except Dulcimer seemed determined to be on the seedship, which held, at a squeeze, four or five. The argument went on until Julian Graves, who had so far said nothing, shouted everyone down in his hoarse, cracking bass. "Quiet! I will make the assignment. Let me remind all of you that the Erebus is my ship, and that I organized this expedition."

  It's my bat, Darya thought. And it's my ball, and if you don't go along with my rules you can't play. My god, that's what it is to them. They're all crazy, and to them it's just a game.

  "Captain Rebka, Louis Nenda, Atvar H'sial, J'merlia, and Kallik will fly on the seedship," Graves went on. He glared the group to silence. "And Dulcimer, Professor Lang, and E.C. Tally will stay on the Erebus." He paused. "And I—I must stay here also."

  There was a curious diffidence and uneasiness in his last words.

  "But I think—" Darya began.

  "I know you do." Graves cut her off. "You want to go. But someone has to stay."

  That had not been Darya's point. She was going to say that it was asking for trouble, putting Rebka and Nenda together in one group. She glanced across at the two men, but Rebka was distracted, staring in puzzlement at Graves. Julian Graves himself, with the uncanny empathy of a councilor, somehow picked up Darya's thought and read it correctly.

  "We may need several individuals oriented to fast action on the seedship," he said. "However, to avoid potential conflicts let it be clear that Captain Rebka will lead that group unless he becomes incapacitated. In which case Louis Nenda will take over."

  Darya half expected Nenda to flare up, but all he did was shrug and say thoughtfully, "Good thinkin'. It's about time the action group had somethin' to do. Keep the academic types all together back here, an' mebbe the rest of us—"

  "Academic types! Of all the nerve . . ." After the last year, Darya found such a description of herself totally ludicrous. And then she saw that Nenda was grinning at the way she had taken the bait.

  "You may get your chance anyway, Darya," Hans Rebka said. "Once we know the way in we'll relay it back to you. Keep the Indulgence ready in case we have problems and need you to come through and collect us. But don't start worrying until you haven't heard from us in three days. We may need that long before we can send you a drone."

  He started to lead the seedship group out of the control chamber. "One other thing." He turned back as he reached the exit. "Keep the Erebus engines powered up, too, all the time, and be ready to leave. And if you get a call from us and we tell you to run for it, don't try to argue with us or wait to hear details. Go. Get out of the Anfract and into free-space, as fast as you can."

  Dulcimer was coiled in the seat next to Darya. He turned his slate-gray monocular to her. "Fly away and leave them? I can see that there may be perils for the seedship in passing through the singularities—especially without the services of the spiral arm's master pilot. But what can they be expecting to find within the singularities, dangerous to us back here on the Erebus?"

  "Zardalu." Darya returned the stare. "You still don't believe they're real, do you, even after everything we've told you? They are, though. Cheer up, Dulcimer. Once we find them, according to your contract you're entitled to twelve percent."

  The great lidded orb blinked. If Darya had known how to read his expressions she would have recognized a scowl on the Polypheme's face. Zardalu, indeed! And she had referred to his twelve percent far too glibly. She was taunting him! How would he know what they found on Genizee—or how much they would stow away, to recover when he was no longer around to claim his share—if he was not with them?

  Dulcimer knew when someone was trying to pull something over on him. Darya Lang could say what she liked about living Zardalu, the original bogeymen of the spiral arm, but he was sure that was all nonsense. The Zardalu had been wiped out to the last land-cephalopod, eleven thousand years before.

  Dulcimer realized how he'd been had. They all talked dangers, and being ready to fly for your life, just so that Dulcimer would not want to go into the singularities.

  And it had worked! They had caught him.

  Well, you fool me once, shame on you. You fool me twice, shame on me. They would not trick him so easily again. The next time anyone went looking for Genizee—or Zardalu! Dulcimer sniggered to himself—he certainly intended to be with them.

  Chapter Nine: Genizee

  The seedship was making progress.

  Slow progress. It had penetrated the sphere of the first singularity through a narrow line vortex that shimmered threateningly on all sides, and now it was creeping along the outer shell of the second, cautious as bureaucracy.

  Hans Rebka sat in the pilot's seat, deep in thought, and watched the ghostly traces of distorted space-time revealed on the displays. There was little else to look at. Whatever might be hidden within the shroud of singularities, its nature could not be discerned from their present position. It had not been his decision as to who would travel on the seedship, but he realized he was glad that neither Darya Lang nor Julian Graves was aboard. They would be going mad at the slow pace, chafing at the delays, pointing out the absence of apparent danger, pushing him to sp
eed up.

  He would have refused, of course. If Hans Rebka had been asked for his basic philosophy, he would have denied that he had any. But the nearest thing to it was his profound conviction that the secret to everything was timing.

  Sometimes one acted instantly, so fast that there seemed no time for any thought at all. On other occasions one took forever, hesitating for no apparent reason, pondering even the most seemingly trivial decision. Picking the right pace was the secret of survival.

  Now he was crawling. He did not know why, but it did not occur to him to speed up. There had been no blue-egged robin's nests in Rebka's childhood, no idyllic years of maturing on a garden planet. His homeworld of Teufel offered no birthright but hardship. He and Darya Lang could not have been more different. And yet they shared one thing: the hidden voice that sometimes spoke from deep within the brain, asserting that things were not what they seemed, that something important was being overlooked.