Resurgence (20 page)

It couldn't be any type of high-density natural body at the middle of the hollow planetoid. The attraction was too strong for that. So what was it?

Tally had been falling with his body in a vertical position. He looked down, past the boots of his suit, and saw directly beneath him a rolling whirlpool of black oil, curling and tumbling on itself. As he watched, it grew rapidly in size. In another split-second he would fall into its depths.

E.C. felt the enormous satisfaction of one whose theories had been fully vindicated. This
was
a Builder artifact. The proof of that was right below him, in the form of a Builder transport vortex.

As he dropped into the churning heart of the whirlpool, his attosecond mental circuits had time for a last twinge of conscience. Despite his promise, it was unlikely that in the immediate future he would be able to report his discovery to Julian Graves.

First the
Have-It-All
flew away. The ship vanished into the nearby Bose node, taking with it—to who-knew-where—Louis Nenda, Atvar H'sial and their slaves, along with survival specialist Sinara Bellstock. Next to leave were Hans Rebka and Darya Lang, flying off to Iceworld with Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner. Finally, E.C. Tally departed.

The
Pride of Orion
—what was left of it, after giving birth to the
Savior
and the
Tally-ho
—felt like a dead ship.

At first Torran Veck and Teri Dahl avoided each other's company. Both felt like failures, the specialists that no one had a use for. Neither wanted the company of still another failure. But finally, with the arrival of Tally's message, they had to talk to each other.

"What does he mean,
I have discovered a planetoid to which some intelligent agent may have made modifications
?" Teri Dahl was lightly built, with long, slim limbs, dark-brown hair, and a coffee complexion. Her constant irritation was being mistaken for a child. She was sitting cross-legged on the bunk in Torran Veck's cabin. "If that embodied computer were a human, he'd be a moron. Tally couldn't have been more vague if he tried."

"It's ridiculous." Torran Veck occupied—and overflowed—the only chair. "Graves received that message hours ago, and since then there hasn't been another word. Suppose Tally is in trouble? We know the exact location of his ship, and you and I are trained survival specialists. Why aren't we heading out there. Why are we sitting doing nothing?"

"Why are we here at all, when Ben Blesh and Sinara Bellstock and Lara Quistner are away on assignments?" Teri glanced at the cabin eye, confirming that it was turned off. It was, but even so she lowered her voice. "When we were in our final stages of training, did you have an affair with one of the instructors?"

"What if I did?" If Torran Veck was startled by the sudden change of subject, he did not let it show. "It wasn't forbidden, and I wasn't the only one. I certainly didn't get favored treatment on any of the tests—Mandy was probably harder on me than anyone else."

"I believe you. I'm not suggesting you had an easy time. But I'll tell you one thing. If I'd had something going with an instructor, after our training was all done there were certain questions I couldn't have resisted asking Mandy."

"Like?"

"Like how well I had done, compared with others. That wouldn't be giving me an advantage. It would just be pillow talk."

"Mm." Torran Veck had a big, fleshy nose. He tended to pinch the bridge between finger and thumb when he was thinking. He held it now. "What gave us away? We agreed there would be no signs of public affection and no favoritism. Otherwise we'd both have been in trouble."

"You overdid it. Both of you. In the classes, Mandy was hard on you when there was no reason. And you never looked directly at her."

"Mm."

"Well? Did you? Ask questions, I mean, about how you had done?"

"Maybe."

"And perhaps how other people had done?"

"So what if I did? Teri, where are you taking this?"

"I didn't have Mandy's ear, but all during training I couldn't help comparing the members of our group. I watched you perform, and Lara, and everyone else. I bet you did the same."

"Of course I did."

"But you had Mandy to confirm your gut reactions. I didn't. I'll tell you what I think, and I'd like your comment. All right?"

"Maybe."

"There were two stand-out trainees in our group. Their names were Torran Veck and Teri Dahl. You and me. We were easily the best of the bunch, and there was hardly a whisker separating our final scores."

Torran stopped holding the bridge of his nose. "Are you sure you didn't have inside information?"

"Not a scrap. But I use my eyes and ears, same as you do. Comments?"

"Some of these are Mandy's, not mine—though I agree with you and her, we were both top of the class, kick-ass compared with the others. Ben's smart, but he has these feelings of inadequacy. That makes him want to do wild things, just to prove he can. He gets scared, but he'll try to be a hero even if it kills him. If Ben gets into trouble it will be because he thinks that when you are in charge it's a weakness to say you don't understand or don't know. Lara is smart, too—hell, we all are. But her personality has a built-in contradiction. She doesn't really want to run things. So she takes orders—but then she resents being given them. She will get into trouble trying to prove that she makes command decisions as well as anyone, when in fact she doesn't."

He paused, until Teri asked, "That leaves Sinara. What about her?"

"Mandy has a soft spot for Sinara."

"So do you."

"A little. I have a soft spot for you, too, but not enough to distort my judgment of either of you. Sinara ought never to have become a survival specialist. She has mood swings. Sometimes she's all dreamy and romantic, sometimes she's a practicing nymphomaniac."

"You would know, I suppose."

"Don't go by rumors. Anyway, Sinara isn't exactly what you would call a responsible person. If Ben is looking to be a hero, Sinara is looking to find one. Mandy believes Sinara only went into this business because her family wanted her to—father's dying wish and all that. He was in the same line of work, killed in the Castlemaine disaster. But Sinara shouldn't be looking after other people. She needs somebody to look after
her
."

"Now she's off with Louis Nenda and his crew of alien thugs. Heaven help her. I can't see him taking care of anybody but himself."

"Look on the bright side. Maybe this is what she needs to sort her out. But I don't think you asked if you could come to my cabin so we could sympathize with Sinara or anyone else. Where are you going with all this?"

"I'm going to see Julian Graves. But I wanted to talk to you first." Teri uncrossed her legs and stood up from the bunk in one easy movement. "I think you ought to come with me. You've confirmed what I have been thinking, now let's find out what Graves has in his head. He must have been given a detailed report on each of us before the
Pride of Orion
ever left Upside Miranda Port. I want to ask him: Why has he left his best two survival team members—no time for false modesty, Arabella Lund as good as told us that herself—to sit here staring at our belly buttons, while others who are less qualified are taking the risks?"

Teri had felt and sounded totally confident when she talked to Torran Veck. She could feel that assurance draining away when their knock on the door of Graves's cabin was answered with a quiet, "Enter."

The councilor managed to be a formidable presence without even trying. It wasn't his size—Torran topped him by half a head. And it wasn't his manner, which was unfailingly polite and courteous. Maybe it was the knowledge that the misty blue eyes of Julian Graves had looked on multiple cases of genocide. The brain within the bulging cranium had been forced to make lose-lose decisions that condemned whole species in order to spare others. Every one of those choices was graven in the deep furrows on face and forehead.

There was no sign of that traumatic past in the warm smile that greeted Teri and Torran, or in the friendly, "What can I do for you?"

Teri's self-confidence dropped another notch. It was Torran who finally said, "Can we put it the other way round? Everyone else is busy, working to find a way to reach the Marglotta home world. Teri and I have been sitting around for days, totally useless. What can we do for you, or for anybody?"

"To begin with, you can sit down." Graves waved them to seats. His cabin on the
Pride of Orion
was bigger than anyone else's, but so crowded with consoles and displays there was hardly room for its table and six chairs. Teri slid in easily enough, but Torran had to squeeze through and fitted the space between table and wall like a cork in a bottle.

Graves went on, "I have been well aware of your lack of activity, and I expected your arrival before this. Let me congratulate you on the patience that you have shown. However, it was impossible for me to meet usefully with you until certain other activities were complete. When you learn what those activities imply, perhaps you will decide that your enforced idleness was not so bad after all."

He placed himself so that he faced Teri and Torran directly across the table. "You have borne with me for a long time. I ask you to bear with me a little longer, for what may initially seem to be a tedious explanation of the obvious. My aim will fairly soon become clear; but first, a simple fact: there are at least thirty sentient species scattered around our own Orion Arm. In my role as Ethical Councilor, I have encountered and been obliged to deal with more than half of those. An equal number of intelligent species probably exist here in the Sagittarius Arm, although the only one with which I have direct experience is the Chism Polyphemes. The species vary widely in their physiology, their reproductive habits, their life styles, and their notions of morality. What they do
not
vary in—what is common to every one of them—is the underlying logic of their thought processes. When it comes to the way that we think, even the most alien species follows the same patterns as we do. Are you with me so far?"

Teri said, "We all think the same. Except—" She paused, unsure of herself.

Graves smiled. "My dear, I see that you are not only with my argument, you are ahead of it. As you say,
except
. Except that we find ourselves in a situation for which the laws of logic do not appear to apply. Before we embarked on this journey we were provided—you might say, spoon-fed—a set of Bose transition coordinates to carry us across the Gulf. Our end point was to be the Marglotta home world. We crossed the Gulf successfully. But rather than finding the Marglotta, instead we find this." He waved an arm. "This, a barren system where the central star suffered some unnatural fate, where there is no sign of life, and where one planet is impossibly cold. The general answer was to blame the perfidious Polypheme. As a habitual liar, it had deliberately directed us to this system in order to keep secret the whereabouts of our real destination. Everyone agreed, we should not be here. Everyone was eager to be on their way immediately, to find and proceed to Marglot.

"You may argue that I could have said no. I could have insisted that we do additional analysis. I am, after all, the official leader of this expedition. But as you will one day discover, a leader is not a leader because of the way that he or she behaves. He is a leader only because of the way that he is
treated by others
. On this expedition there are individuals with far more experience than I of unknown territories and hidden danger. Unlike you, they lack respect for authority. Had I attempted to propose analysis rather than action, I would have faced open rebellion. Uncomfortable as I was with my own decision, I therefore permitted them to go. I would, however, remain here. I did not reject the need for action. I merely postponed it, until I could prove a conjecture. And I would keep with me the most competent members of the survival team."

Torran nodded and smiled. Teri did not smile, and she felt embarrassed. She wondered why the councilor was taking such care to lavish compliments. He wanted something from them, but what could it be?

Graves went on, "Let me tell you my difficulty, and see how you react. I have been puzzled since the moment we arrived here by three observations which are either facts, or at least strong conjectures. First, everyone has emphasized that the Chism Polypheme was dead when it arrived at Miranda. Polyphemes enjoy enormously long life spans. Surely this means that the Polypheme never
expected
to die in transit. It thought that it would bring the Marglotta to Miranda, and return with them—and us—to the Sag Arm. Second, the death of the Marglotta on the Polypheme's ship was also not anticipated. They, too, must have expected to reach us and tell us of their problems. They hoped we would go with them to their home world of Marglot. So the fact that Polyphemes are traditional liars is not relevant, unless the Marglotta are also liars. Not one persistently lying species, but two? As I told Professor Lang on another subject, I do not like to concatenate implausibilities. And now for my third observation: there were many Marglotta on the ship—eighteen of them. There was a single Chism Polypheme, and the Polyphemes are justly famous as navigators. If you agree with all this, what conclusions would you draw?"

Teri and Torran turned to glance at each other. He gave a little wave of his index finger.
You first
.

She grimaced.
Thanks a lot. Let me be wrong
. And to Julian Graves, "It was the Marglotta's idea to come to the Orion Arm. They were in charge, and the Polypheme was just a hired hand."

"Precisely. Which means?"

Teri nudged Torran's leg under the table.
Your turn.
 

He grunted, and said, "There would be no point at all in the Polypheme trying to keep the final destination secret. The Marglotta would have been right there to answer our questions."

"And therefore?"

"We didn't blunder into this system by accident. It was intended that our ship would arrive, just where we did—and it must be possible to reach Marglot
through a Bose transition point located right here
."