Convergent Series (16 page)

Louis Nenda was coarse, barbaric, and disgusting. But once he said it, it became obvious. Atvar H'sial had come to Dobelle too well prepared with contingency plans, just as though she had known that the requests for access to Quake would all be refused.

"What about Julius Graves? Him too?"

But Nenda only shook his head. "Old numb-nuts? Nah. He's a mystery. I'd normally have said, sure, he's here for the same reason as we are. But he's Council, an' even if you don't believe half of what you hear about them—I don't—I've never heard of one lying. Have you?"

"Never. And he didn't expect to go to Quake when he came, only to Opal. He thought those twins he's after would be here."

"So maybe he's for real. Either way, we can forget him. If he wants to go to Quake, he'll do it. The bozos can't stop him." They were back at the building, and Nenda paused just outside the door. "All right, we had our little chat. Now for the best question of all. Just
what
is going to happen on Quake at Summertide?"

Darya stared at him. Did he expect her to answer that? "I don't know."

"Come on, you're stalling again. You
must
know—or you wouldn't have dragged all this way."

"You have it exactly backward. If I
did
know what will happen, or if I even had a halfway plausible idea of it, I'd never have left Sentinel Gate. I like it there. You dragged all this way, too. What do
you
think will happen?"

He was glaring at her in frustration. "Lord knows. Hey, you're the genius. If
you
don't know you can be damned sure I don't. You really have no idea?"

"Not really. It will be something significant, I believe that. It will happen on Quake. And it will tell us more about the Builders. Beyond that I can't even guess."

"Hell." He slashed at the damp ground with the cane. Darya had the feeling that if Kallik had been there, the Hymenopt would have been the recipient of that blow. "So what now, Professor?"

Darya Lang had been worrying the same question. Nenda seemed to want to cooperate, and she had been drawn along by her thirst for any facts and theories relevant to the Builders. But he seemed to have nothing—or at least, nothing he was willing to give. And she was already talking of working with Atvar H'sial and J'merlia. She could not work with both. And even though she had agreed to nothing definite, she could not mention her other conversations to Louis Nenda.

"Are you proposing that we cooperate? Because if you are—"

She did not have to finish. He had thrown his head back and was hooting with laughter. "Lady, now why would I do a thing like that? When you've just told me you don't know a damned thing!"

"Well, we have been swapping information."

"Sure. That's what you're good at, that's what you're famous for. Information and theories. So how are you at lying and cheating? How are you at
action
? Not so good, I'll bet. But that's what you'll need to get yourself over to Quake. And from what I hear, Quake won't be any picnic. I'll have my work cut out there. Think I want to baby you, sweetheart, and tell you when to run and when to hide? No thanks, dear. You arrange your own parade."

Before she could respond he strode ahead of her, into the building and through to the interior room where they had started. Kallik and J'merlia were still there, crouched low on the floor with their multiple legs spread flat and intertwined. They were exchanging ominous whistles and grunts.

Louis Nenda grabbed the Hymenopt roughly by the halter, attached the black cane, and pulled. "Come on, you. I told you, no fighting. We've got work to do." He turned back to Darya. "Nice to meet you, Professor. See you on Quake?"

"You will, Louis Nenda." Darya's voice was shaking with anger. "You can count on it."

He gave a scoffing laugh. "Fine. I'll save a drink for you there. If Perry's right, we may both need one."

He pulled hard on the cane and dragged Kallik out.

Seething, Darya went across to where J'merlia was slowly standing up. "How is Atvar H'sial?"

"Much better. She will be fully ready to resume work in one more Dobelle day."

"Good. Tell her that I have made up my mind and agree to cooperate fully with her. I will do everything we discussed. I am ready to take off for Quakeside and the Umbilical as soon as she is recovered."

"I will tell her this at once. It is good news." J'merlia moved closer, studying Darya's face. "But you have had some bad experience, Darya Lang. Did the man seek to hurt you?"

"No. Not a physical hurt." But he hurt me anyway. "He made me angry and upset. I'm sorry, J'merlia. He wanted to talk, and so we went outside. I thought you were asleep. I didn't realize that you would be threatened by that horrible animal of his."

J'merlia was staring at her and shaking his thin mantis-head in a gesture he had picked up from the humans. "Threatened? By that?" He pointed to the door. "By the Hymenopt?"

"Yes."

"I was not threatened. Kallik and I were beginning a proto-converse—a first learning of each other's language."

"Language?" Darya thought of the whipping cane and the halter. "Are you telling me that it can
talk
? It's not just a simple animal?"

"Honored Professor Lang, Kallik can certainly talk. She never had the chance to learn more than Hymenopt speech, because she met few others and her master did not care for her to know. But she is learning. We began with less than fifty words in common; now we have more than one hundred." J'merlia moved to the door, his wounded leg still trailing. "Excuse me, honored Professor. I must leave now and find Atvar H'sial. It is a pity that Kallik is leaving this place. But maybe we will have an opportunity to talk and learn again when they arrive."

"Arrive? Where are they going?"

"Where everyone is going, it seems." J'merlia paused on the threshold. "To Quake. Where else?"

Violent resistance is a problem, but nonresistance can be harder to handle.

Hans Rebka felt like a boxer, braced for a blow that never came. At some level he was still waiting.

"Didn't they fight it?" he asked.

Max Perry nodded. "Sure. At least, Louis Nenda did. But then he said he'd had it with the Dobelle system, and we could take his access request and stuff it, he was getting the hell out of here as soon as he could. And he already left."

"What about Darya Lang and Atvar H'sial?"

"Lang didn't say a word. There's no way of knowing what Atvar H'sial
thinks
, but what came out of J'merlia didn't have much steam in it. They went off to sulk on another Sling. I haven't seen them for two days—haven't had time to bother with them, to be honest. Think we ought to be worried?"

The two men were in the final moments of waiting as the capsule taking them to Quake was coupled to the Umbilical. They were carrying their luggage, one small bag for each man. Julius Graves was over by the aircar that had brought them from Starside, fussing with his two heavy cases.

Rebka considered Perry's question carefully. His own assignment to Dobelle involved only the rehabilitation of Max Perry. In principle it had nothing to do with members of other clades, or how they were treated. But as far everyone on Opal was concerned, he was a senior official, and he had the duties that went with the position. He had received a new coded message from Circle headquarters just before they left Starside, but he had no great hopes that it would help him much, whatever it said. Advice and direction from far away were more likely to add to problems than to solve them.

"People ought to be protesting a lot more," he said at last. "Especially Louis Nenda. What's the chances that he might leave Opal and try for a direct landing on Quake from space? He came in his own ship."

"There's no way we could stop him
trying
. But unless his ship is designed for takeoff without spaceport facilities, he'll be in trouble. He might get down on Quake, but maybe he'd never get off it."

"How about Darya Lang and Atvar H'sial?"

"Impossible. They don't have a ship available, and they won't be able to rent one that will fly interplanetary. We can forget about them."

And then Perry hesitated. He was not sure of his own statement. There was that feeling in the air, a sense of final calm before a great storm. And it was not just the cloudbursts that threatened Opal within twenty-four hours.

It was Summertide, hanging over everything. With thirteen Dobelle days to go, Mandel and Amaranth loomed larger and brighter. Average temperatures were already up five degrees, under angry clouds like molten copper. Opal's air had changed in the last twelve hours. It was charged with a metallic taste that matched the lowering sky. Airborne dust left lips dry, eyes sore and weeping, noses itching and ready to sneeze. As the massive tides brought the seabed close to the surface, undersea earthquakes and eruptions were blowing their irritant fumes and dust high into the atmosphere.

Julius Graves had finally stowed the cases to his satisfaction in the bottom level of the Umbilical's car. He walked over to the other two men and stared up at the lambent sky.

"Another storm coming. A good time to be leaving Opal."

"But a worse time to be going to Quake," Perry said.

They climbed into the car. Perry provided his personal ID and keyed in a complex command sequence.

The three men maintained an uneasy formality as the ascent began. When Perry had quietly informed Graves that access to Quake was denied until after Summertide, Graves had just as coolly asserted the authority of the Council. He would be going to Quake anyway.

Perry pointed out that Graves could not prevent planetary officials from accompanying him. They had a responsibility to stop him from killing himself.

Graves nodded. Everyone was polite; no one was happy.

The tension eased when the capsule emerged from Opal's clouds. The three men had something else to occupy their minds. The car had been provided with sliding viewing ports in its upper level, as well as a large window directly overhead. The passengers had an excellent view of everything above and about them. As Quake appeared through the thinning clouds, any attempt at small talk faded.

Julius Graves stared around, gasped, and gaped, while Max Perry took one look up and retreated into himself. Hans Rebka tried to ignore their surroundings and focus his mind on the task ahead. Perry might know all about Quake, and Graves might be a fount of information about every subject under a thousand suns; yet Rebka had the feeling that he would have to carry both of them.

But carry them through what? He looked around, to find a panorama that swept away all rational thoughts. He had traveled the road to Quake just a few days before, but nothing was the same. Mandel, grossly swollen, loomed on the left. The Builder-designed shell of the car detected and filtered out dangerous hard radiation, turning the star's glowing face into a dark image seamed and pocked with faculae, sunspots, and lurid flares. The disk was so large that Rebka felt he could reach out and touch its raddled surface.

Amaranth—a dwarf no longer—stood beyond Quake. The companion was transformed. Even the color was changed. Rebka recognized that as an artificial effect. When the car windows altered their transmission properties to screen radiation from Mandel, they also modified the transmitted spectrum of Amaranth. Orange-red was transformed to glowering purple.

Even Gargantua was well on the way to its final rendezvous. Reflecting the light of both Mandel and Amaranth, the gas-giant had swelled from a distant spark to a thumbnail-sized glow of bright orange.

The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin. In the final hours of Summertide, Mandel and Amaranth would pass within five million kilometers of each other—the thickness of a fingernail, in stellar terms. Gargantua would hurtle close by Mandel on the side opposite to Amaranth, propelled in its orbit by the combined field of both stellar companions. And little Dobelle, caught in that syzygy of giants, would gyrate helplessly through the warp and woof of a dynamic gravitational tapestry.

The Dobelle orbit was stable; there was no danger that Opal and Quake would separate, or that the doublet might be flung off to infinity. But that was the only assurance the astronomers would provide. Summertide surface conditions on Opal and Quake could not be calculated.

Rebka stared up at Quake. That ball of dusky blue-gray had become the most familiar feature in the sky. It had not changed perceptibly since the last ride up the Umbilical.

Or had it? He stared harder. Was the planet's limb a little fuzzier, where dust in the peel-thin layer of air surrounding Quake had become thicker?

There were few distractions to draw a traveler's mind away from the outside view. Their ascent was at a constant rate, with no sense of motion inside the car. Only a very careful observer would notice the golden knot of Midway Station slowly increasing in size, while the apparent gravity within the capsule was just as gradually diminishing. The journey did not take place in free-fall. The body forces were decreasing steadily, but the only weightless part of the journey would be two thousand kilometers beyond Midway Station, where all centrifugal and gravitational forces were in balance. After that came the real descent to Quake, when the capsule would truly be falling toward that planet.

Rebka sighed and stood up. It would be easy to allow the skyscape to hypnotize him, as Quake hypnotized Max Perry. And not just Perry. He glanced across at Graves. The councilor was totally absorbed in a reverie of his own.

Rebka walked over to the ramp and went down its turning path to the lower level of the capsule. The galley was a primitive one, but there had been no chance of a meal since they left Starside. He was hungry and not choosy, and he dialed without looking. The flavor and contents of the container of soup that he ordered did not matter.

With its opaque walls, the lower level of the capsule was depressingly bland. Rebka went to the table and selected a private music segment. Pre-Expansion music, complex and polyphonic, sounded within his head. The intertwining fugal voices suggested the coming interplay of Mandel and its retinue. For ten minutes Rebka ate and listened, enjoying two of the most basic and oldest pleasures of humanity. He wondered. Did the Cecropians, lacking music, have some compensating art form of their own?