The Spheres of Heaven Page 14

  "Now you wait a minute." Bony felt his head ready to explode. He was going to hit Indigo unless he could find a distraction. "There might be something there. It's difficult to see outside when the cabin lights are on. Suppose we turn them off."

  "Suppose we do. We'll still see nothing." But Indigo went across to the console, and a moment later the cabin lights dimmed.

  "Just as I expected," Indigo said in the darkness. "Pure imagination. You and your damn lights, Liddy. You didn't see . . ." His voice faded.

  The sun had set, and its light no longer diffused down from above. The Mood Indigo sat in a silent, stygian gloom. But far away, so faint that one moment it seemed to be there and in the next the eye had lost it, a tiny splinter of light shone wanly through the green water.

  "There it is," Bony said breathlessly. "Liddy, you said you saw a column of lights."

  "That's what it looked like from above. But they were all pointing in this direction, so from here they line up. I can still make out about a dozen of them, only not so clearly."

  They were silent for a long time, peering into darkness, until Liddy added, "I can't be sure. But I think they're moving. Yes, they are."

  Bony stared until his eyes felt ready to pop out of his skull. It was no good. To him, it was still a single blur of light. Indigo must have been in the same situation, because he said quietly and without skepticism, "Moving how, Liddy?"

  "Moving this way. Look, can't you see that one of them is slightly ahead of the others?"

  Liddy must have eyes like an eagle. Bony couldn't see any such thing. But then, suddenly, he could. The single line of light resolved itself into separate points. He tried to count them, but lost track when he reached ten. The splinter of light had at first been blue-green, now its separate points shone with a yellower glow. And each point was slowly brightening. Was it his imagination, or were they also moving up and down?

  "They're coming this way," said Liddy. Her voice was calm, but Bony felt her hand take his in the darkness and grip it hard. "I wasn't sure before, but now I am. They seemed to point toward the ship when I first saw them, because they were moving in single file. And they still are."

  "You're right." Indigo sounded anything but calm. "I can see them, too. If they keep up that speed they'll be here in another few minutes. Thank God I installed weapons on the ship, just in case. Rombelle—"

  "We're under water, sir. Fire weapons in our situation, and we'll be more likely to blow ourselves up than anything else."

  "Well, we have to do something. If we're attacked we can't just sit here."

  "I don't think we have to worry too much." Bony offered that reassurance more for Liddy's benefit than because he believed it. He went on, "Remember, these are sea-creatures. Even if they are intelligent, they won't know about fire or have the technology to develop explosives or projectile weapons."

  Bony didn't fully believe what he said. Nor, judging from the grunt from the darkness, did Friday Indigo, but there was a certain perverse pleasure in quoting the other man's own words back to him.

  "The lights are being carried," Liddy said suddenly. "They are some sort of oblong balls, all filled with light."

  "Bioluminescent," Bony added. To him they were still shapeless blobs. "That's what you would expect in marine organisms, some form of phosphorescence or bioluminescence. You wouldn't expect ordinary combustion."

  "Stuff your combustion." Indigo sounded frantic. "I don't want idiot science lectures. Carried by what, Liddy?"

  "I can't tell yet. But in another minute or two we can get a closer look—"

  "The scopes!" Bony shouted the words, while he groaned inside at his own mental inadequacy. He had been peering hopelessly and unthinkingly into the darkness like Neanderthal man trying to see outside his cave, while the Mood's sophisticated imaging sensors and image intensifiers sat unused beside him. He fumbled his way to the console, turned on an internal light, and pulled up a display connected to the scopes. A few of them would certainly not work—thermal infrared sensors relied on radiation, not physical contact with the sensors—but visible wavelengths should be fine.

  Another half minute when he seemed to be all thumbs, and then he had it. The screen showed a patch of lights at its center. He zoomed in.

  And there they were. He had half known it, even before he thought of using the scopes. Fourteen bubble creatures—now he could count them, easily—were drifting toward the ship along the seabed. Each one floated in front of it a giant light, pear-shaped but the size of a watermelon. With that illumination Bony could make out every detail of their bodies.

  The ball-like heads sat on rounded iridescent trunks that quivered when the creatures moved, as though the whole animal was boneless and made of soft jelly. Nothing in the head resembled a nose or mouth, unless it was the wide horizontal slit that sat close to the top of the rounded body. Above the head, connected to it by a pair of delicate-looking fringed stalks or antennae, hovered two green spheres that were probably eyes. If so they were separately controlled, turning independently and apparently randomly to point in different directions. The watermelon-pear light was carried easily by four string-of-bubble arms or tentacles, and four more waving limbs attached to the bottom of the globular body carried it easily over the uneven ocean floor.

  The whole added up to such an appearance of fragility and vulnerability that Bony felt reassured. The creatures shown by the scope seemed as soft and harmless as children's toys. But so, he reminded himself, did a Portuguese man-of-war, with its agonizing sting.

  Liddy Morse and Friday Indigo had moved away from the port to stand next to Bony, staring at the display.

  "Son of a bitch," Indigo said softly. "They're real. You didn't make them up after all."

  "They're real all right." Bony had the computer hooked in to the scope circuit, analyzing the movement of the creatures on the display. He glanced at its output. "Real, heading right for us, and unless they decide to stop they'll be here in seven minutes."

  "What do we do?"

  Apparently Indigo had decided that Bony, science lectures and all, was not such an idiot. Bony thought for a moment. "If they're as soft as they look, there's no way that they can damage the hull. But I've been wrong so often today I wouldn't put money on it. I suppose we could all put space-suits on. But I doubt if it's worth it. If they can break into the hull, the suits won't hold them for a minute."

  Indigo nodded. "No suits, then. So what do we do?"

  The same question again, and a very reasonable one. But Bony was out of ideas. He had been exhausted, even before he and Liddy arrived back aboard the ship. Now he felt giddy with fatigue, and his brain had already gone on strike. "I guess"—he looked apologetically at the other two—"I guess we wait."

  * * *

  Seven minutes.

  The sea-creatures steadily came closer. The tension in the cabin grew until it was thick enough to choke them. No one had anything to say.

  Six and a half minutes.

  Bony decided that seven minutes would hardly feel longer if you were being operated on without anesthetics by a sadistic torturer. Purely for something to do, he asked the ship's computer what a planet would be like if it had the same gravity as Earth's moon and was the size of Earth. It asked him a bunch of foolish questions about density distributions, none of which he could answer. He told it to make any default assumptions it liked, and stop bothering him.

  The answer came quickly, but it was not very informative. If a world had the same size and internal mass distribution as the Earth, then if its surface gravity was equal to the Moon's mean surface gravity, its average density would be 0.91.

  Less than one. According to the computer, the average density was less than that of ordinary water. But the whole ocean of Limbo was salty heavy water, with a density fifteen percent more than ordinary water. There was no way that Limbo ought to possess an ocean at all. At that planetary density, all liquid water should have sunk below the surface.

  Bony stared at
the offending number. Nothing about Limbo made sense. The ridiculously low density. The heavy-water sea. The blue giant star, too young to allow life to develop on a planet around it. The Link access point, in water where no Link access could be. And if there were such a Link point, how had they been able to transfer to it when the ship's automatic protection system forbade transfer with substantial matter present? Limbo simply became stranger and stranger with every passing hour.

  But maybe it was about to get stranger yet. In the darkened cabin, Liddy said softly, "They're here."

  It was not necessary to use the imaging sensors and the enhancers to know that. They could see light shining in through the ports. The ring of sensors on the Mood Indigo stood about four meters above the seabed, and they gave an excellent view of the scene below. Fourteen bubble-creatures, each with its light, had drifted to surround the ship in a rough circle. As Bony watched, one of them left the circle and floated in toward the base of the vessel, beyond the imaged area. A soft thump vibrated through the hull. It sounded more exploratory than violent, but Indigo said nervously, "They're attacking the ship. What do we do now?"

  "That doesn't seem like an attack. No, don't!" Bony spoke to Liddy, who was about to go over to the port. "Stay here, where we can see them with the image system and they can't see us. I don't think they have good night vision, because they're carrying lights. But if you get close to the port they may see reflected light from your face. Keep your voice down, too. If they can't see or hear us they may go away."

  "It's back in the circle," Indigo said. "The one who banged on the ship, I mean. They're all there now. Uh-oh. What are they doing?"

  The giant glowing pear-shapes were dimmer, and the scene provided by the ship's imaging sensors was fading steadily to a uniform gray.

  "I don't know how they're doing it, but the lights they're carrying are going out." Bony clicked the image sensitivity range to a different setting, and the scene outside again became visible, now in black and white. "Look at them. They seem to be settling down. I think the Limbics are going to sleep."

  "The who?" Friday Indigo stared. "Where the hell did you get that from?"

  "We need a name for them, and they live on Limbo. I think they're probably intelligent, seeing how they use portable lights to see at night."

  The creatures no longer stood above the seabed on their bubble strings of tentacles. Instead, the rounded end of the body had settled comfortably down onto the sea floor, where the array of pikes had been crumbled to dust by the arrival of the Mood Indigo. At the upper end of the body, the antennae with their green sphere eyes drooped down to sit on each side of the soap-bubble head. Each had placed its light neatly on the sea floor, with the wide end of the pear facing down.

  The humans in the cabin sat in frozen silence, watching and waiting for what felt like forever.

  At last Liddy said, in a whisper, "If they're going to do nothing, why did they come?"

  "I have no idea," Bony replied just as softly. "But I suspect we're not going to find out tonight. Maybe they think that we're asleep. Animals without technology follow the same schedule as the sun."

  "Do you really believe they'll stay quiet until morning?" Indigo had sagged slowly back in his chair as the immediate danger seemed less.

  "It looks like it. They're not moving."

  "Then I'm going." Indigo came to his feet, quietly but with determination. "To my own cabin. No, Liddy"—she had been sitting with her head bowed, but lifted it as he stood up—"not tonight. It's been a tough day. Tonight I need peace and quiet, not company. You stay here with Rombelle and keep watch. And you, Rombelle, none of your damned banging and hammering. You won't wake me, because I'm putting a wave feedback unit on as soon as I get up there. But if those Limbic things of yours are asleep outside, let's keep it that way."

  Indigo went across to the ladder, carrying with him the tiny portable light that now provided the only illumination for the cabin. In the final glimmer before Indigo and the light disappeared, Liddy glared—not at Indigo, but at Bony. As soon as the captain was on the upper level and out of hearing, she whispered, "Why do you let him treat you like that?"

  "Who?"

  Bony realized it was not a very intelligent question, given that Indigo was probably the only human male within a hundred lightyears. But before he could say more, Liddy burst out, "You're much smarter than he is. You do all his work, and all his thinking."

  "Not so loud!"

  Her voice had been rising in pitch, and when she spoke again it was shriller than ever. "Who explored the seabed outside the ship, and the surface of the water, and the land? Who may have found the Link? Not Friday Indigo. You did it all. But he treats you like dirt—and you let him, with never a word of complaint. He tells you he had a hard day, he needs to rest—when he hasn't done a thing. And you don't utter one peep."

  The injustice of it had Bony speechless—almost. "Me!" He heard his voice squeak with outrage. "You think he treats me badly? What about you? It burns me up, the way he talks to you. How do you feel when he says, `I brought you along for your body, not your brains'? How dare he say that? The nerve of the man!"

  "What's wrong with my body?"

  "Nothing." Bony wished there were enough light to see her facial expression. Was that anger, or insecurity? "I think your body is perfect."

  "So you're agreeing with what he did. He didn't buy me for my brains. He bought me for my body."

  "That might be true, but it doesn't make it right. You have a beautiful face and body, but you have a brain, too, a good brain. You're a person, Liddy. More than just a body, more than just a b-brain. A whole person!" He was stammering in his excitement, and his voice grew louder. "How can you let him treat you like a b-b-bimbo?"

  "And how can you let him order you to keep watch while he sleeps? Don't you need sleep, too? Does he think you're a machine, and not a human being? Do you know the only reason I didn't scream when he said that to you?" Liddy was close to screaming now. "It's because I wouldn't feel safe if he was on watch, he'd do something stupid. But I feel safe with you. Indigo and I know we can rely on you to do anything that's needed. Doesn't that mean he bought you even more than he bought me?"

  "The arrogant little bastard." In his anger Bony brushed off her question. "He talks to you like you're a moron. He makes you share his bed and he forces his body on you. When I think of you screwing with that mouse-brained idiot—"

  "Mind your own business, Bony." Liddy's voice turned icy.

  "It is my business."

  "Oh, is it? Since when? You think now you own me, instead of Friday Indigo? Well, let me tell you, he owns you a lot worse than he owns me. With me, it's only an hour or two every few days. I can stand that, I was trained for it. Can you say as much? It's twenty-four hours a day for you, every day, servant and slave. How do you stand it, Bony Rombelle?"

  Any thought of whispering was long gone. Bony was drawing in his breath for another loud exchange when he stopped, frozen. He was facing Liddy, and over her shoulder at one of the ports he saw a faint, pale circle.

  He reached forward and placed his hand over her mouth. He dropped his voice back to a whisper. "Don't move. Don't make a noise. There's a Limbic behind you, right outside the ship."

  One of the bubble people was floating high above the sea floor, its round head level with the port. Green globe eyes pressed to the thick transparent plastic.

  "I don't think it can see us." As Bony placed his mouth next to Liddy's ear he could smell the faint fragrance of her hair. "There's just enough glow outside for us to see it, but I doubt it can see much in here. I certainly can't."

  He felt her breath on his cheek, and she murmured softly, "It was the noise, all the shouting and screaming. My fault."

  "No! Mine, I got carried away. When I think of Friday Indigo—"

  "Shh!"

  He felt her hand on his mouth, and her body shaking. Was she shivering? No. She was laughing.

  As she took her hand away he muttered, "A
ren't you frightened?"

  "No. Should I be?"

  "I don't know. With all this." He made a gesture toward the outside, which he realized she could not see. "Uncertainty is enough to scare most people."

  "Are you scared?"

  "I can't say. This is almost too interesting to let me be frightened at the same time."

  "Well, Friday Indigo isn't frightened, either. He's sure you can handle anything that comes along. Do you want me to have less faith in you than he does?"

  "He's a fool and you're not. He thinks if you have enough money, you can buy safety. He thinks you can buy anything. He thinks he owns you, and any time he wants to stick his—"

  Her hand was on his mouth again. "I don't want to hear what he sticks, and I don't want to think about where." He felt rather than saw her move to his side on the padded bench seat. She whispered, "Do we really want to start on Friday Indigo all over again? If we're going to talk about anybody, shouldn't it be you and me? But not yet!"

  The pale face was still at the port. They waited, now in silence, for whatever might come next. Bony, with Liddy's body warm against his, felt willing to wait forever. At last there was a stir outside the port, and the round head with its green bubble eyes sank away out of sight. Liddy said in his ear, "What now?"

  "You sleep. I keep watch."

  "Would you like to trust me as much as I trust you?"

  "Of course I would."

  "Right then." She slid farther along the bench and pulled Bony down so that his head was pillowed on her lap. "Trust me. You did most of the work today, and you've looked exhausted for hours. You need sleep more than I do. I keep watch."

  "I can't let you do that."

  "Because you own me, right, and you can order me around just like Friday Indigo does?"

  "Of course not. But if he gets up and finds me asleep in this position, instead of being on watch—"

  "You mean that you don't own me, but he owns you twenty-four hours a day? Bony, answer me one question. Is anything going to happen before morning?"

  "I don't think so. I'd be very surprised if it does."