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  While you're still savoring that planet and trying to remember its name, it, too, begins to move off, pulled out of sight along the Necklace. No matter. The world that draws in after it is even better, the world of your dreams. You once lived there, and loved there, and now you realize that you never should have left. You slaver over it, wanting to fly down to it now, and never leave.

  But before you can do so, it, too, is sliding out of your field of view. And what replaces it makes the last planet seem nothing but a pale shadow world . . .

  It goes on and on, as long as you can bear to watch. And at the end, you realize something dreadful. You never, in your whole life, visited any one of those paradise worlds. And surely you never will, because you have no idea where they are, or when they are.

  You pull yourself together and start your ship moving. You decide that you'll go to Persephone, or Styx, or Savalle, or Pelican's Wake. You tell yourself that you'll forget all about the Anfract and God's Necklace.

  Except that you won't, no matter how you try. For in the late night hours, when you lie tight in the dark prison of your own thoughts, and your heart beats slow, and all of life feels short and pointless, that's when you'll remember, and yearn for one more drink at the fountain of the Torvil Anfract.

  Your worse fear is that you'll never get to make the trip; and that's when you lie sleepless forever, aching for first light and the noisy distractions of morning.

  —from Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort:

  Jetting Alone Around The Galaxy; by

  Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)

  Chapter Six: Bridle Gap

  The Erebus was a monster, more like a whole world than a standard interstellar ship. Unfortunately, its appetite for power matched its huge size.

  Darya sat in one of the information niches off the main control room, her eyes fixed on two of several hundred displays.

  The first showed the total available energy in the vessel's central storage units.

  Down, down, down.

  Even when nothing seemed to be happening, the routine operation and maintenance of the ship sent the stored power creeping toward zero.

  But normal operation was nothing compared to the power demands of a Bose Transition. For something as massive as the Erebus, each transition guzzled energy. They had been through one jump already. Darya had watched in horror as the transition was initiated and the onboard power readout flickered to half its value.

  Now they were sucking in energy from the external Bose Network, in preparation for another transition. And that energy supply was far from free. Darya switched her attention to the second readout, one specially programmed to show finance, not engineering. It displayed Darya's total credit—and it was swooping down as fast as the onboard power of the Erebus went up. Three or four jumps like the last one, and she would be as flat broke as the rest of the group.

  She brooded over the falling readout. It was a pretty desperate situation, when a poor professor at a research institute turned out to be the richest person on board. If she had been of a more paranoid turn of mind, she might have suspected that she had been invited along on this trip mainly to bankroll it. Julian Graves had used all his credit to buy the Erebus. E.C. Tally was a computer, albeit an embodied one, and owned nothing. J'merlia and Kallik had been penniless slaves, while Hans Rebka came from the Phemus Circle, the most miserably poor region of the whole spiral arm. The exception should have been Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial; but although they talked about their wealth, every bit of it was on Nenda's ship, the Have-It-All, inaccessible on far-off Glister. At the moment they were as poor as everyone else.

  Darya glanced across to the main control console, where Louis Nenda was all set to take them into their second jump. They were just one Bose Transition away from the region of the Torvil Anfract; one jump would leave them with comfortably enough power for the return journey.

  Except that they were not going to make the jump! Louis Nenda had been adamant.

  "Not with me on board, you don't." He glared around the circle. "Sure, we been through a lot together, and sure, we always muddle through. That don't mean we take chances with this one. This is the Anfract. It's dangerous, not some rinky-dink ratbag planet like Quake or Opal."

  Which came close to killing all of us, Darya thought. But she did not speak, because Julian Graves was slapping his hands on his knees in frustration.

  "But we have to go into the Anfract. You heard E.C. Tally's analysis, and I thought you were in agreement with it. There is an excellent chance that the Zardalu cladeworld is hidden within the Torvil Anfract, with living Zardalu upon it."

  "I know all that. All I'm saying is we don't go charging in. People have been pokin' around the Anfract for thousands of years—an' most who went in never came out. We need help."

  "What sort of help?"

  "We need an expert. A pilot. Somebody who's been around this part of the arm for a long time and knows it like the back of his chelicera."

  "Do you have a candidate?"

  "Sure I got one. Why'd you think I'm talking? His name's Dulcimer—an' I'm warning you now, he's a Chism Polypheme. But he knows the arm cold, and he probably needs work. If we want him, we have to go looking. One thing for sure, you won't find him around the Anfract."

  "Where will we find him?" Darya had not understood Nenda's warning about Chism Polyphemes, but figured they'd better take one problem at a time.

  "Unless he's changed, he'll be sittin' around and soaking up the hot stuff in the Sun Bar on Bridle Gap."

  "Can you take us there?"

  "Sure." Louis Nenda moved to the main control console. "Bridle Gap, no sweat. Only one jump. If Dulcimer still hangs around in the same place, and if he's broke enough to need work, and if he still has a brain left in his pop-eyed head after he's been frying it for more years than I like to think—well, we should be able to hire him. And then we can all go off together an' get wiped out in the Anfract."

  Chism Polypheme.

  As soon as the Bose jump was complete and the Erebus had embarked on its subluminal flight to Bridal Gap, Darya consulted the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients) in the ship's data banks.

  And found nothing.

  She went to see Louis Nenda, lounging in the ship's auxiliary engine room. He was watching Atvar H'sial as she ran a dozen supply lines to a glossy chestnut-brown ellipsoid about three feet long.

  "It don't surprise me," Nenda said in answer to Darya's question. "Lot more things in the spiral arm than there is in the data banks—an' half of what's in there is wrong. That's why E.C. Tally's so screwed up—he only knows what the data banks dumped into him. You won't find the Polyphemes in the Species Catalog, because they're not local. Their homeworld's way outside the Periphery, some godawful place in the Sagittarius arm on the other side of the Gap. What you want to know about Dulcimer?"

  "Why did you say 'I'm warning you now, he's a Chism Polypheme'?"

  "Because he's a Chism Polypheme. That means he's sly, and servile, and conceited, and unreliable, an' he tells lies as his first preference. He tells the truth when there's no other option. Like they say, 'There's liars, and damn liars, and Chism Polyphemes.' There's another reason the Polyphemes aren't in your data bank—no one could get the same story from 'em twice running, to find out what they are."

  "So why are you willing to deal with him, if he's such an awful person?"

  Nenda gave her the all-admiring, half-pitying glance that so annoyed Hans Rebka, and stroked her upper arm. "First, sweetie, because you know where you stand with a guaranteed liar. An' second, because we got no option. Who else would be crazy enough to fly into the Anfract? And be good enough to get us there. You only use a Polypheme when you're desperate, but they're mebbe the galaxy's best pilots, and Dulcimer's top of the lot. He usually needs work, too, 'cause he has this little problem that needs feedin'. Last of all, we want Dulcimer because he's a survivor. He claims he's fifteen thousand years old. I think he's lying—that wou
ld mean he was around before the Great Rising, when the Zardalu ruled the Communion—but the records on Bridle Gap show he's been droppin' into the Sun Bar there for over three thousand years. That's a survivor. I like to go with survivors."

  Because you are one, yourself, Darya thought. And you're a liar, too—and you're self-serving. So why do I like you? And speaking of lying . . .

  "Louis, when you told us how you and Atvar H'sial left Serenity, you said something I don't understand."

  "We didn't just leave—we were thrown out, by that dumb Builder construct, Speaker-Between."

  "I know that. But you said something else about Speaker-Between. You said that you thought it was lying about the Builders themselves."

  "I never said it was lying. I said I thought it was wrong. Big difference. Speaker-Between believes what it told us. It's been sittin' on Serenity for four or five million years, convinced that the Builders are just waitin' in stasis until Speaker-Between and The-One-Who-Waits an' who knows how many other constructs have selected the right species to help the Builders. An' then the Builders will pop back out of stasis, and everything will be fine, and Speaker-Between and his lot will live happy ever after.

  "Except that's all bunk. Speaker-Between's dodderin' along, doing what it thinks it was told to do. But I don't believe that's what it was really told by the Builders. You can get things screwed up pretty bad in five million years. Atvar H'sial agrees with me—the constructs are conscientious, an' real impressive when you first meet 'em. An' they got lots of power, too. But they're not very smart."

  "If that's true, where are the Builders? And what do they really want the constructs to do?"

  "Beats me. That's more your line than mine. An' right now I don't much care. We got other worries." Nenda turned, to where Atvar H'sial had finished connecting the supply lines. "Like how we land on Bridle Gap. We'll be there in two days. The Erebus can't go down, because J'merlia and Kallik were dumb enough to buy us a Flying Dutchman. An' we don't have credit to rent a downside shuttle. So you better cross your fingers."

  Atvar H'sial was turning spigots, and the pipes leading to the brown ovoid were filling with cloudy liquid. Darya followed Louis Nenda and bent to stare at the shiny surface of the egg.

  "What is it?"

  "That's the question of the moment. This is the gizmo that Julian Graves found when he was pokin' around the other day. No one could identify it, but yesterday At took a peek at its inside with ultrasonics. She thinks it might be a ship-seed. The Erebus is a Tantalus orbital fort, so it never expected to land anywhere. But there would be times when people on board needed to escape. There were a dozen of these eggs, stacked away close to the main hatch. In a few hours we'll know what we've got. 'Scuse me. At says I hafta get busy."

  He hurried away from Darya to crouch by the spigots and control their flow. Fluids were moving faster through the supply lines, and the glossy surface of the ellipsoid was beginning to swell ominously. A soft, throbbing tone came from its interior.

  "Don't get too close," Nenda called.

  The warning was unnecessary. As the egg began to quiver, Darya turned and headed out through the exit of the auxiliary engine room. Nenda had given her a lot to think about.

  Atvar H'sial watched until Darya was out of sight. "That departure is not before time, Louis Nenda." The pheromonal message carried a reproving overtone. "As I remarked before, the human female provides an undesirable distraction for you."

  "Relax, At. She don't care about me, and I don't care about her. All she's worried about is the Builders, and where they are."

  "I am not persuaded; nor, I suspect, is Captain Rebka."

  "Who can go stick it up his nose. And so can you." Louis spoke in irritated tones—but he did not provide his final comment in pheromonal translation.

  The world of Bridle Gap had never been settled by humans.

  The reason for that was obvious to the crew of the Erebus long before they arrived there. The parent star, Cavesson, was a tiny fierce point of violet-blue at the limit of the visible spectrum, sitting within a widespread shell of glowing gas. The stellar collapse and shrugging off of outer layers that had turned Cavesson into a neutron star forty thousand years earlier would have vaporized Bridle Gap—if that world had been close-by at the time. Even today, the outpouring of X- rays and hard ultraviolet from Cavesson created an ionized shroud at the outer edge of Bridle Gap's atmosphere. Enough ultraviolet came blazing through to the surface to fry an unshielded human in minutes.

  "It must have been a rogue planet," said Julian Graves. The Erebus had sat in parking orbit for a couple of hours, while the ship's scopes revealed as much surface detail as possible. Now it was time for action.

  "It was on a close-approach trajectory to Cavesson," he went on, "and if the star hadn't blown up, Bridle Gap would have swung right on by. But the ejecta from Cavesson smacked into it and transferred enough momentum to shove it to a capture orbit."

  "And if you believe that," Hans Rebka said softly to E.C. Tally, "you'll believe anything."

  "But you reject that explanation?" The embodied computer was standing between Rebka and Darya Lang, waiting for Atvar H'sial's signal from within the seedship that the interior was thoroughly hardened and the little vessel ready to board.

  Rebka gestured to the blazing point-image of Cavesson. "See for yourself, E.C. You take a look at the spectrum of that, then tell me what sort of life could develop on a void-cold rogue world, far from any star, but adapt fast enough to survive the sleet of radiation from Cavesson."

  "Then what is your explanation for the existence of Bridle Gap?"

  "Nothing to make you feel comfortable. Bridle Gap was moved here by the Zardalu, when they controlled this whole region. The Zardalu had great powers when humans were still swinging in the trees—just another reason to worry about them now." He began to move forward. "Wherever it came from, the planet must have had natural high-radiation life-forms. You'll see them for yourself in a couple of hours, because it looks like we're ready to go."

  Louis Nenda had appeared from within the seedship's hatch. "Tight squeeze," he said. "And goin' to be rough when we get down there. Sure one of you don't want to stay with the rest?"

  Rebka ignored the invitation to remain behind and pushed E.C. Tally on ahead of him into the seedship's interior. With Atvar H'sial already inside, it was a tight fit. The seed, full-grown, was a disappointment. The hope had been for a sizable lifeboat, capable of carrying a substantial fraction of the Erebus's total passenger capacity. Instead the final seedship proved to be a midget: puny engines, no Bose Drive, and only enough room to squeeze in four or five people. The landing party had been whittled down: Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial, most familiar with Zardalu Communion territory and customs; E.C. Tally, to provide an exact visual and sound record of what happened on the surface, to be played back for the others who stayed on board the Erebus; and finally Hans Rebka, for the good—but unmentioned—reason that somebody less naive than E.C. Tally was needed to keep an eye on Nenda and Atvar H'sial.

  The group remaining on the Erebus had been assigned one unrewarding but necessary task: to learn all that could be learned about the Torvil Anfract.

  The planet that the seedship drifted down to was at its best from a distance. Two hundred miles up, the surface was a smoky palette of soft purple and gray. By two thousand feet that soft, airbrushed texture had resolved to a jumbled wilderness of broken, steep-sided cliffs, their faces covered with spiky gray trees and shrubs. The landing port for Bridle Gap occupied half of an isolated long, fat gash on the surface, with a dark body of water at its lower end. Louis Nenda took the ship down with total confidence and landed at the water's edge.

  "That'll do. Cross your fingers and claws. We'll know in another five minutes if Dulcimer's here." He was already smearing thick yellow cream over his face and hands.

  "Five minutes?" E.C. Tally said. "But what about the time it takes to clear customs and Immigration?"

  Nenda gave him o
ne incredulous stare and continued applying the cream. "Better get coated, too, 'less you wanna crisp out there in two seconds." He went to the hatch, cracked it open and sniffed, then fitted improvised goggles into position. "Not bad. I'm goin'. Follow me as soon as you're ready."

  Hans Rebka was right behind as Nenda stepped out onto the surface.

  He gazed all around and made his own evaluation. He had never been to this particular planet, but he had seen a dozen that rivaled it. Bridle Gap was bad, and one would never go outside at noon, but it was no worse than his birthworld of Teufel, where no one who wanted to live went out while the Remouleur dawn wind blew.

  He looked east through his goggles, to where Cavesson's morning rays were barely clearing the jagged upthrust fingers of the cliffs. The sun's bright point was diffused by the atmosphere, and the breeze on his face was actually chilly. He knew better than to be misled by either of those. Even thinned by dust and cloud and ozone, Cavesson was delivering to the surface of Bridle Gap a hundred times as much UV as a human's eyes and skin could tolerate. The air smelled like a continuous electrical discharge. The flowers on the vegetation at water's edge confirmed the deadly surroundings. Drab gray and sable to Rebka's vision, they would glow and dazzle out in the ultraviolet, where the tiny winged pollinators of Bridle Gap saw most clearly.