Transvergence (18 page)

"
If
. And it is a big if." But Julian Graves was taking the drone wearily from Darya, and handing it to E.C. Tally.

Darya saw, and understood the significance of that data point. She had won! She moved on at once to the next problem: how to make sure that she was not, for any reason, left behind on the
Erebus
when others went through the singularities to seek Hans Rebka and his party.

In parallel, Darya's mind took satisfaction in quite a different thought: She had changed an awful lot in one year. Twelve months before in faculty meetings at the Institute, she would have wasted an hour at that point, presenting more and more evidence to buttress her arguments; and then the subject would have been debated endlessly, on and on, until everyone in the meeting was either at the screaming point or mad with boredom.

Not anymore, though, at least for Darya. Somehow, without ever discussing such things, Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda had taught her a great truth:
Once you win, shut up. More talk only makes other people want to argue back.

There was a corollary to that, too: If you save time in an argument, don't waste it. Start work on the next problem.

Darya admired her own new acuity as she left the control room and headed for the cargo bay that housed the
Indulgence
. It was time for work. When E.C. Tally returned with an analysis of that soil sample and Graves made up his mind what to do, Darya wanted to be second only to Dulcimer himself in knowledge of the Polypheme's ship.

Before she even reached the cargo bay, Julian Graves was calling her back. He had already made up his mind. He knew what had to be done: Darya would fly into the nested singularities. E.C. Tally would accompany her, with Dulcimer as pilot of the
Indulgence
. Julian Graves would remain on the
Erebus
. Alone.

Baffling. But say it again:
Once you win, shut up.

She grabbed Tally and Dulcimer, hustled them onto the
Indulgence
, and was heading the ship out of the cargo bay of the
Erebus
—before Julian Graves had a chance to change his mind.

In her eagerness to leave, Darya did not apply another of Hans Rebka's survival rules:
If you win too easy, better ask what's going on that you don't know about.

Hans Rebka might have guessed it at once: Julian Graves
needed
to be alone, for some compelling reason of his own. But Hans was not there to observe Graves, or to warn Darya of something else. He had observed her over the past year, and he would have agreed with her: there
had
been big changes in Darya Lang. But those changes were incomplete. Darya was too self-confident. Now she knew just enough to be dangerous to herself and to everyone around her.

Rebka would have offered a different corollary to her Great Truth:
Don't waste time solving the wrong problems.

Darya Lang was intellectually very smart, up at genius level. But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data. That was where Darya's troubles began. In Hans's terms, when she lacked the right data she still did not know how to acquire it.

That was not her fault. Most of Darya's life had been spent evaluating information collected by other people, of far-off events, times, and places. Data were printouts and articles and tables and images. Success was defined by an ability to digest a huge amount of information from all sources, and then devise a way to impose order and logic on it. Progress was often slow. The path to success might be decades long. No matter.
Speed
was not an issue.
Persistence
was far more important.

Hans Rebka was a graduate of a different school of life. Data were
events
, usually happening in real time and seldom written out for inspection. They could be anything from an odd instrument reading, to a sudden change in the wind, to a scowl that became a smile on a person's face. Success was measured by
survival
. The road to success might remain open only for a fraction of a second.

Rebka had noticed the anomaly when Julian Graves first announced who would go down in the seedship to look for Genizee, and who would remain on the
Erebus
: Graves would not go, although it was
Graves
who had felt most strongly the need to seek out the Zardalu—Graves who had resigned from the Council, Graves who had organized the expedition, Graves who had bought the ship. And then, with Genizee identified and the Zardalu hidden only by the shroud of singularities, Julian Graves had suddenly declined to pursue them.
"I must stay here."

Now Graves had again refused to leave the
Erebus
. Unfortunately, Hans Rebka had not been around to warn Darya Lang that his second refusal must be regarded as far more significant.

To penetrate the nested singularities for the first time had been an episode of tension, of cautious probing, of calculated risk. For the
Indulgence
, following the path of the seedship less than two days later, the journey was routine. The information returned with the drone had provided a description of branch points and local space-time anomalies in such detail that Dulcimer took one look at the list, sniffed, and set the
Indulgence
to autopilot.

"It's an insult to my profession," he said to E.C. Tally. The Chism Polypheme was lounging in his pilot's chair, a lopsided device arranged so that his spiral tail fitted into it and all his arms had access to the control panel. He was cool again, his skin returned to its dark cucumber green, but as the heat faded from him he became increasingly irritable and haughty. "It's a slur on my Chismhood."

Tally nodded, but did not understand. "Why is it an insult and a slur?"

"Because I'm a Polypheme! I need challenges, perils, problems worthy of my talents. There is
nothing
to this piloting job, no difficult decisions to make, no close calls—a Ditron could do it."

Tally nodded again. What Dulcimer seemed to be saying was that a Chism Polypheme found work unsatisfying unless there was substantial risk attached to it. It was an illogical attitude, but who was to say that Polyphemes were logical? There was no information about them in Tally's data bank.

"You mean you thrive on difficulty—on danger?"

"You better believe it!" Dulcimer leaned back and expanded his body, stretching to full length. "We Polyphemes—specially me—are the bravest, most fearless beings in the Galaxy. Show us danger, we eat it up."

"Indeed." Tally took a microsecond to mull over that odd statement. "You have often experienced danger?"

"Me? Danger?" Dulcimer swiveled his chair to face Tally. An embodied computer was not much of an audience, but there was nothing else available. "Let me tell you about the time that I beat the Rumbleside scad merchants at their own game, and came
this
close"—he held up his top two hands, a fraction of an inch apart—"to being killed along the way. Me and the scad merchants had been having a little disagreement, see, about a radiation shipment I made that shrunk on the way—nothing to do with me, as I explained to them. They said not to worry, things like that can happen to anyone, and anyway they had another job for me. I was to go to Polytope, fill my cargo hold with local ice, and bring it back to Rumbleside. Water-ice? I said. That's right, they said. There's a lot of water-ice on Polytope? I said. There sure is, they said, any amount. But we want just
Polytope
water, ice, no other. And we want big penalties if you don't deliver on time.

"I should have known something was a bit funny when I read the agreement, because the penalties for nondelivery included my arms and my scanning eye. But I've shipped water-ice a thousand times, with never a problem. So we shook tongues on it like civilized beings, and I headed the
Indulgence
for Polytope.

"Only thing is, they hadn't mentioned to me that Polytope is a world that the Tristan free-space Manticore dreamed on one of its off days. On Polytope, you see, water
decreases
in volume as it turns to ice instead of expanding as it does everywhere else. And it was a cold world, too, below freezing point most of the year. So the oceans never froze over, but when the water at the top got cold enough to turn to ice, that ice just sank down to the bottom and stayed there.

"There was certainly plenty of water-ice on Polytope, and a shipment of it would sure be valuable—but it was all down under five kilometers of water. I checked the land surface. Polytope had plenty of that, too, but no water-ice on it. I needed a submersible. But the nearest world where I could rent one big enough was so far away, I'd have blown my contract deadline before I could get there and back. What to do, Mr. Tally. What to do?"

"Well,"—Tally's pause for thought was imperceptible in human terms—"If I were placed in such a position—"

"I know you have no idea, sir, so I'll tell you. There was a mining world less than a day's jump away. I flew there, rented land-mining equipment, flew back, and put the
Indulgence
down by the side of the ocean. I dug a slanting tunnel, thirty kilometers long—very scary, I was worried all the way about the roof collapsing on me—down under the ocean bed. And then I dug
upward
until I reached the water-ice sitting on the seabed. I mined it from the
bottom
, you see, then pulled it along the tunnel to my ship. I took off, and got back to Rumbleside with the shipment and with two minutes to spare before my deadline. You should have seen the disappointed faces of those scad merchants when I arrived! They were already sharpening their knives for me." Dulcimer leaned back expansively in his chair. "Now, tell me true, sir, did you ever have an experience to match that?"

E.C. Tally considered experiences and matching algorithms. "Not exactly
equivalent
. But perhaps
comparable
. Involving the Zardalu."

"Zardalu! You met Zardalu, did you? Oh yes." Dulcimer put on the facial expression that to a thousand worlds in the spiral arm indicated a Chism Polypheme at its most sneering and insulting. To E.C. Tally it suggested that Dulcimer was suffering badly from stomach gas.

"Zardalu. Well, Mr. Tally." The Polypheme inclined to indulgence, as the name of his ship pointed out. He nodded. "Since we've nothing better to do, sir, I suppose you may as well tell me about it. Go ahead."

Dulcimer lolled back in his chair, prepared to be thoroughly skeptical and bored.

The
Indulgence
had negotiated the final annular singularity. They were inside, and Darya could see the planet of Genizee, surely no more than half-a-million kilometers away. She did a quick scan of the surface for the seedship beacon, whose signal should have been easily detected from this distance.

There was no sign of it. She was not worried. There was no chance that the beacon could have been destroyed, no matter how fast the atmospheric entry or how hard the impact with the surface. The beacon was meant to withstand temperatures of thousands of degrees, and decelerations of many hundreds of gravities.

The seedship must be on the other side of the planet, with its signal shielded by Genizee's bulk. The planet was amazingly close. Darya decided that Dulcimer had done an outstanding job. Who had said that the Polypheme was only a good pilot when he was radiation-hot? Well, they were quite wrong.

She headed from the observation bubble of the
Indulgence
to the control room, intending to congratulate Dulcimer. He was sitting in the pilot's chair, but his corkscrew body was coiled so tightly that he was no more than three feet long. His scanning eye was withdrawn, his master eye focused on infinity. E.C. Tally was sitting next to him.

"We've arrived, E.C. That planet outside is Genizee." She bent to peer at Dulcimer. "What's wrong with him? He hasn't been soaking up hard radiation again, has he?"

"Not one photon." Tally moved his shoulders in the accepted human gesture of puzzlement. "I have no idea what has happened to him. All we have done is talk."

"Just talk?" Darya noticed that Tally had a neural cable attached to the back of his skull. "Are you sure?"

"Talk—and show a few visuals. Dulcimer told me of one of his numerous dangerous experiences. Nothing comparable has ever happened to me, but I in return explained our encounter with the Zardalu, back on Serenity. I fed some of my recollections into the display system of the
Indulgence
, though I chose to do so from the point of view of an uninvolved third party, rather than from my own perspective."

"Oh, my lord. Louis Nenda warned us—Dulcimer is easily excited. Run it again, E.C. Let me see what you showed him."

"Very little, really."

The three-dimensional display in the center of the control room came alive. The chamber filled with a dozen hulking Zardalu, advancing on a small group of humans who were vainly trying to hold them off with flashburn weapons that did little more than sting them. In the center of the group, noticeably less nimble than the others, stood E.C. Tally. He hopped clumsily from side to side, then closed with one of the Zardalu to provide a maximum-intensity burn. He was too slow jumping clear. Four tentacled arms, as thick as human thighs, seized and lifted him.

"Tally! Stop it there."

"I explained to Dulcimer," E.C. Tally said defensively. "I told him that although I am sensitive to my body's condition, I do not feel pain in any human or Polypheme sense. It is curious, but I have the impression that when I began to talk he did not really believe that we had encountered the Zardalu. Certainly his manner suggested skepticism. I think it was at this point that he became convinced."

The display was still running. The Zardalu, filled with rage and bloodlust, had started to pull E.C. Tally apart. Both arms were plucked free, then the legs, one by one. Finally the bloody stump of the torso was hurled away, to smash against a wall. The top of Tally's skull was ripped loose. It flew free and was cracked like an eggshell by a questing Zardalu tentacle.

"Tally, will you for God's sake
stop
it!" Darya reached for the arm of the embodied computer, just as the display flickered and vanished.