Convergent Series (37 page)

"That's what the message is all about." Birdie dropped the pretense of ignorance. "They want to know why you're still here. They ask when you'll be leaving. You could be in a lot of trouble if you don't reply."

Julius Graves ignored him. "But what could be assigned to me on Miranda half as important as what may be happening out near Gargantua? To quote Steven again, if we return to Miranda we will surely be assigned to another case of interspecies conflict and ethical dilemma. But if the Builders
are
waiting out at Gargantua, as Darya Lang insists they must be, then the greatest interspecies meeting in the history of the spiral arm is waiting with them. The ethical issues could be vast and unprecedented, and all these events may be triggered by the arrival of Darya Lang, Hans Rebka, and the two slaves—unless they have already been precipitated by the earlier arrival of Atvar H'sial and Louis Nenda. In either case, my own future action is at last clear. I must requisition a starship and follow the others to Gargantua. I do not say this immodestly, but their interactions could be disastrous without the mediating influence of a Council member. I therefore ask your assistance in finding me such a starship, and in outfitting it suitably for the journey to Gargantua . . ."

Graves was maundering on, but Birdie was hardly listening. At last, they were going to be rid of a useless drone—for that's what Julius Graves was proving to be, even if he did happen to be a Council member. If he wanted a ship, Birdie could not stop him, though Lord knows where they would find one, with everything in such a mess. Birdie would have to do it somehow, because a councilor could commandeer any local resources that he or she deemed necessary. Anyway, the temporary loss of a ship was a small price to pay to get rid of the distracting and the time-wasting influence of Julius and Steven Graves.

" . . . Mr. Kelly, as soon as possible."

The mention of Birdie's own last name jerked his attention back to the other man. "Yes, Councilor? I'm sorry, I missed that."

"I was saying, Mr. Kelly, that I appreciate this to be a time of considerable stress for everyone on Opal. With Starside Port out of action, finding a working spaceship may call for considerable improvisation. At the same time, I hope that you and I can be on our way to Gargantua fairly soon—shall we say, in one standard week?"

"Me?"
Birdie had not been listening right; he must have missed a key part of what Graves had been saying. "Did you say me? You didn't say me, did you?"

"Certainly. I know that Gargantua and its satellites are already fifty million kilometers away and getting farther every minute, but they still form part of the Mandel system. I discussed the matter with Commander Perry, and although his own duties on Opal prevent him from traveling, he believes a presence from this planet's government is important. He is issuing orders for you to accompany me on his behalf to Gargantua."

Gargantua. 
 

Week-dead Dowser did not taste great at the best of times. Birdie pushed the plate away from him and tried to hold on to what he had already eaten. He stood up. He must have said something to Julius Graves before he found himself once more walking outside the building, but under torture he could not have recalled what it was.

Gargantua! Birdie peered upward, into Opal's blue sky. Mandel was rapidly sinking toward sunset, as Opal and Quake performed their dizzying eight-hour whirl about each other. Somewhere out there, beyond the pleasant blue sky, out where Mandel was diminished to a squinty little point of light, there rolled the gas-giant planet surrounded by its frosty retinue of satellites. They were stark, frozen, lifeless, and dark. Even the best-prepared expeditions to Gargantua, led by the Dobelle system's most experienced space travelers, had suffered considerable casualties. The outer system was simply too remote, too cold, too inhospitable to human life. Compared with that, Opal during a Level Five storm felt safe and welcoming.

Birdie stared around him. He knew it all, from the sticky familiarity of warm black mud underfoot and the thicketed tangle of vines that began just a few meters from the building, to the heavy backs of the huge, lumbering tortoises, making their unhurried way inland through the undergrowth after surviving Summertide at sea. Birdie recognized them all; and he loved them all.

Earlier in the day this whole pleasant prospect had seemed too good to be true. He had just learned that it was.

The
Summer Dreamboat
had started life as a plaything, a teenager's runabout intended for within-system planetary hops. Everything aboard the ship had been designed with that in mind, from the compact galley, sanitation, and disposal facilities, to the single pair of narrow berths. The addition of a full-fledged Bose Drive had provided the
Dreamboat
with a far-ranging interstellar capability, while whittling the internal space down even further.

Its occupants—or at least the human ones—were cursing that addition now as wasted space. The passage from Dobelle to Gargantua had to be done using the cold-catalyzed fusion drive, which could make no use at all of the Bose interstellar network.

During the second day of the journey Darya Lang and Hans Rebka had retreated to the berths, where they lay side by side.

"Too many legs," Rebka said softly.

Darya Lang nodded. She did not say it, but they both knew the cramped quarters were harder on her. He had grown up on Teufel, one of the poorest and most backward worlds of the Phemus Circle. Hardship and discomfort were to him so natural and so familiar that he did not even recognize their presence. She had been spoiled—though she had never known it, until the past couple of months—by the luxury and abundance of Sentinel Gate, one of the spiral arm's garden planets.

"For me, too many legs," she repeated. "Sixteen too many. And too many eyes for
you
."

He understood at once and touched her arm apologetically. The Lo'tfian, J'merlia, seemed mostly legs and eyes. Eight black articulated limbs were attached to the long, pipestem torso, and J'merlia's narrow head was dominated by the big, lemon-colored compound eyes on short eyestalks. Kallik was just as well-endowed. The Hymenopt's body was short, stubby, and black-furred, but eight wiry legs sprang from the rotund torso, and the small, smooth head was entirely surrounded by multiple pairs of bright, black eyes. Kallik and J'merlia did not mean to get in the way, but when they were both awake and active it was impossible to move around the ship's little cabin without tripping over the odd outstretched appendage.

Darya Lang and Hans Rebka had retreated to the berths as the only place left. But even there they found little privacy—or too little, Darya thought, for Hans Rebka.

The two months since she had left her quiet life as a research scientist on Sentinel Gate had been full of surprises; not least of them was the discovery that many "facts" about life on the backward and impoverished worlds of the Perimeter were just not so. Everyone on Shasta knew that the urge to reproduce dominated everything on the underpopulated planets of the Phemus Circle, where both men and women were obsessed with sex. The rich worlds of the Fourth Alliance "knew" that people on Teufel and Scaldworld and Quake and Opal did it whenever and wherever they could.

Perhaps so, in principle; there was a curious primness in border planet society when it came to practice. Men and women might show immediate interest in each other, from bold eye contact to open invitation. But let the time arrive for
doing
something, in public or even in private, and Darya suspected they were oddly puritanical.

She had obtained positive and annoying proof of that idea when the
Summer
Dreamboat
embarked on the long journey to Gargantua. On the first night the two aliens had stretched out on the floor, leaving the berths to Darya and Hans. She lay in her bunk and waited. When nothing happened, she took the initiative.

He rebuffed her, though in an oddly indirect way. "Of course I'd like to—but what about your foot?" he whispered. "You'll hurt it too much. I mean—we can't. Your foot . . ."

Darya's foot had been burned during the retreat from Quake at Summertide. It was healing fast. She resisted the urge to say, "Damn my foot. Why don't you just let
me
be the judge of what hurts too much?"

Instead she withdrew, convinced that Hans came from one of those curious societies where women were not supposed to take the lead in sexual matters. She waited. And waited. Finally, during the next sleep period, she asked what was wrong. Wasn't he interested? Didn't he find her attractive?

"Of course I do." He kept his voice low and glanced across toward the two aliens. As far as Darya could tell they were both sound asleep, in an untidy sprawl of intermeshed limbs. "But what about
them
?"

"What
about
'em? I hope you're not suggesting they should join in."

"Don't be disgusting. But if they wake up, they'll see us."

So that was it. A privacy taboo, just like the one on Moldave. And apparently a strong one. Hans would not be able to do anything as long as they were cooped up in the ship with J'merlia and Kallik, even though the aliens could have nothing beyond a possible academic interest in human mating procedures.

But their indifference did not change the situation for Hans Rebka. Darya had given up.

"Too many eyes for you," she repeated. "I know. Don't worry about it, Hans. So how much longer before we reach Gargantua?"

"About forty hours." He was relieved to change the subject. "I can't stop wondering—what do you think we are going to find there?"

He looked at Darya expectantly. She had no answer, though she admitted the justice of his question. After all, she was the one who had actually
seen
the dark sphere gobble up Louis Nenda's ship and head off to Gargantua. Hans had been too busy trying to stop Nenda from shooting them out of the sky. But did she really expect to find the Builders there, now that she'd had plenty of time to think about it?

For Darya, that was the ultimate question. The Builders had disappeared from the spiral arm more than five million years earlier, but she had been pursuing them in one way or another for all of her adult life. It had begun with a single Builder artifact, the Sentinel, visible from her birthworld of Sentinel Gate. Darya had first seen it as an infant. She had grown up with that shining and striated sphere glowing in her night sky. Inaccessible to humans and to all human constructs, the unreachable interior of Sentinel had come to symbolize for her the whole mystery of the lost Builders. Her conviction that Summertide was somehow connected with Builder artifacts had brought her to Dobelle, and the events at Summertide had provided a new insight: the alignment of planetary and stellar positions that caused Summertide was
itself
an artifact, the whole stellar system a construct of the long-vanished master engineers.

But Hans Rebka's question still demanded an answer. Had she become so obsessed with the Builders, and everything to do with them, that she saw Builder influence everywhere? It was not uncommon for a scientist to live with a theory for so long that it took control. Data and observations were forced to fit the theory, rather than being used to test it and if necessary reject it. How did she know she was not guilty of that same failing?

"I know what I saw, Hans. But beyond the evidence of my eyes—however you weight that—all I can offer are my own deductions, however you weight
them
. Can you pick up an image of Gargantua with the external sensors?"

"Should be able to." He craned his head around. "And we ought to be able to look at it right here—we're line-of-sight for the projectors. Don't move. I'll be back in a minute."

It did not take that long. Twenty seconds at the display controls of the
Summer Dreamboat
gave Hans Rebka a three-dimensional image in the space above the twin berths. He carried the remote control unit over to Darya, letting her use it to pinpoint the target and zoom as she chose.

The planet sat in the center of the globe of view. And what a change since the last time that Darya had seen it. Then the light of Gargantua had been screened by the protective filters of the
Dreamboat
's viewing port. The planet had been gigantic, sure enough, bulking across half the field of view, but it had also been faint, faded to a spectral shade by the brilliant torrents of light sleeting in from Mandel and Amaranth. Now Gargantua was a sphere not much bigger than Darya's thumbnail, but it glowed like a jewel, rich oranges and ochers of high-quality zircon and hessonite against a black background scattered with faint stars. There was just a hint of banding to mark the axis of the planet's rotation, and the four bright points of light in suspiciously accurate alignment with the equator had to be Gargantua's major satellites. Darya knew that a thousand other sizable fragments of debris orbited closer to the planet, but from this distance they were invisible. Their paths must have become a monstrous jumble after the perturbations of periastron passage close to Mandel and Amaranth.

Not the harmony of the spheres, but a rough charivari of tangled orbits. Navigation through them would be a problem.

She studied the image, then used the remote marker to indicate a point a quarter of a radius away from the planetary terminator.

"When the ray of light first appeared, it came from just about there." She closed her eyes for a moment, recalling what she had seen. "But it wasn't ordinary light, or it would have been invisible in empty space. I could see it all the way, and I could follow its line right back to that point."

"But couldn't it have come from a lot farther away—way out past Gargantua?"

"No. Because by the time the silver sphere turned into a hole in space, swallowed up Louis Nenda's ship, and zoomed off along the light-line, the ray's point of origin had
moved
. It was right next to Gargantua by the time I lost sight of it. The only way you can explain that is if it came from something
in orbit
around Gargantua."