Transvergence (22 page)

Graves hesitated. J'merlia was right: the seedship had been defenseless. But to take the
Erebus
inside the singularities, surely not . . .

But why not? Almost the whole party was there now, anyway. Julian Graves took his hands away from his eyes, almost ready to force his mind to a decision, and found that J'merlia had not waited for one. The Lo'tfian was already working at the control console, entering an elaborate sequence of navigational instructions.

When the program was complete, J'merlia turned flight execution over to the
Erebus
main computer and turned his thin body to face Julian Graves. "We are on our way. In a day or less, depending on the condition of stochastic elements of our path, we will be within sight of Genizee. But this raises a new question, and one that fills me with concern. Suppose that when we reach Genizee, Captain Rebka's group, or possibly Professor Lang's group, have indeed discovered that the planet is the home of the Zardalu. What will we do then? Would it not be logical to bring our group away to safety, and employ the arsenals of the
Erebus
to exterminate the Zardalu?"

Graves considered himself lucky. He did not have to think about the last question with his poor community of a brain, because he had already thought about it long before, for days and weeks and months. The Zardalu were bloodthirsty and violent and cruel, former masters and tormentors of dozens of other intelligent races. That could not be denied. But Julius Graves had spent years working on an interspecies Council. One of the Council's prime duties was to protect any species that had borderline or even
potential
intelligence. The idea of genocide, of destroying all the surviving members of a
known
-intelligent species, made his stomach turn over.

Revulsion and anger allowed him to generate the single response.

"I am not sure what we will do if Hans Rebka or Darya Lang's parties find Zardalu on Genizee. But I can tell you, J'merlia, what we will definitely
not
do: we will not contemplate deliberate mass destruction of any species that does not threaten
our
species—yours, or mine, or anyone else's—with extinction. I cannot make that point clearly enough."

He did not know how J'merlia would react. This was not the docile, obedient J'merlia that they were all used to. This was an action-oriented, clear-thinking, decisive Lo'tfian. Graves almost expected an argument, and doubted that he was clear-headed enough to manage his end of it.

But J'merlia was leaning back in the chair, his pale eyes staring intently at Graves. "You
can
make that point clear enough, Councilor," he said. "And you
have
made the point clear enough. You will not pursue, permit, or condone the extermination of intelligence. I hear you speak."

As though evaluating the final summing-up of some lengthy argument, J'merlia sat nodding to himself for a few moments. Then he was away, off his seat and scurrying out of the control room. Julian Graves remained to stare after him, to review his perplexed—and oddly multiple—impressions of the past few minutes, and to wonder if he had finally become deranged enough to have imagined the whole encounter.

Except that the
Erebus
, beyond all argument and imaginings, was entering the region of annular singularities, the region that guarded the most famous lost world of all Lost Worlds: Genizee, home of the Zardalu.

LOST WORLDS

It's no secret that a damned fool can ask more questions than the smartest being in the arm can answer. And yes, I am talking about Downsiders. And yes, I am talking about the Lost Worlds. They seem to have an obsession with them.
Captain Sloane—that's how they always start, polite as could be—you claim to have traveled a lot (but there's a little skepticism, you see, right there). Where is Genizee, the Lost World of the Zardalu?
I don't know, I say.
Well, how about Petra, or the treasure world of Jesteen, or Skyfall or Primrose or Paladin? They know damn well that my answer has to be the same, because every one of those worlds—if they were ever real places—has been lost, all traces of their locations vanished into time.

Of course, the Downsiders would never dream of going out and
looking themselves
. Much better to huddle down in the mud and wonder, then pester people who
have
been out and seen it all, or as much of it as a body can see.
People like me.
So they say, Captain (and now they're getting ruder), you're full as an egg with talk, and you waffle on to anybody who'll listen to you. But what happened to Midas, where it rains molten gold, or Rainbow Reef, where the dawn is green and the nightfall blazing scarlet and midday's all purple? Hey? What happened to
them
? Or to Shamble and Grisel and Merryman's Woe? They were
once
there, and now they're not. Where did they go? You can't answer
that
one? Shame on you.
I don't let myself get mad (though it's not easy). I burn slow, and I say, Ah, but you're forgetting the wind.
The
wind
? That always gets them.
That's right, I say, you're forgetting the Great Galactic Trade Wind. The wind that blows through the whole galaxy, taking worlds that were once close together and pushing them gradually farther and farther apart.
They look down their noses at me, if they have noses, and say, We've never heard of this
wind
of yours.
Ah, well, I say, maybe there's a lot you never heard of. Some people don't call it the Galactic Trade Wind. They call it Differential Galactic Rotation.
At that point, whoever I'm talking to usually says "Huh?" or something just as bright. And I have to explain.
The whole Galaxy is like every spiral galaxy, a great big wheel, a hundred thousand light-years across, turning in space. Most of the people I talk to at least know that much. But it's not like a Downsider wheel, with rigid spokes. It's a wheel where the spiral arms closer to the galactic center, and all the stars in them, turn at a
faster rate
than the ones farther out. So you take a star—for example, Sol. And you take another well-known object—say, the Crab Nebula in Taurus, six thousand light-years farther out toward the galactic rim. You find that Sol is moving around the galactic center about thirty-five kilometers a second
faster
than the Crab. They're separating, slow but sure, both moving under the influence of the Galactic Trade Wind. (And the wind can work both ways. If you drop behind, because you're farther out from the center, all you have to do is fly yourself in
closer
to the center, and wait. You'll start to catch up, because now you're moving faster.)
But what about the Crab Nebula?, ask some of my Downsider friends, the ones who have understood what I'm talking about. It's a
natural
object; you can't fly it around like a ship. Will it ever come back to the vicinity of Sol?
Sure it will come back, I say. But it'll take a while. The Crab will be close to Sol in another couple of billion years.
And then their eyes pop, assuming they have eyes, and they say, Two
billion
! None of us will be around then.
And I tell them, That's all right, I'm not sure I will be, either. In fact, some nights I'm not sure I'll be around next morning.
But what I
think
is, you Downsiders—as usual—are asking the wrong question. What
I'd
like to know about isn't the Lost Worlds, it's the Lost
Explorers
. What happened to Aghal H'seyrin, the crippled Cecropian who flew the disrupt loop through the eye of the Needle Singularity? We had one message from her—we know she survived the passage—but she never came back. Or where did Inigo M'tumbe go, after his last planetfall on Llandiver? He sent a message, too, about a "bright braided collar" that he was on his way to explore. No one has ever seen it or him. And what do you make of the last signal from Chinadoll Pas-farda, rolling up the black-side edge of the Coal Sack on a continuous one-gee acceleration, bound, as she said, for infinity?
There's your interesting cases:
people
, not dumb Lost Worlds. I want to know what happened to
them
, my fellow explorers.
I'll fly until I find out; someday. Someday I will know.

—from
Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort:
Jetting Alone Around the galaxy;
by
Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)

Commentator's Note:
Shortly after completing this passage, the last in his published work, Captain Sloane embarked on a voyage to the Salinas Gulf, following the path of the legendary Inigo M'tumbe. He never returned. His final message told of a mysterious serpentine structure, fusion-bright against the stellar backdrop, gradually approaching his ship. Nothing has been heard from him since.
It is perhaps ironic that Captain Sloane himself has now become the most famous and most sought after of all Lost Explorers.

The
Indulgence
arrowed at the surface of the planet in a suicide trajectory, held in the grip of a beam of startling yellow that controlled its movement absolutely. Nothing that Darya Lang did with the drive made a scrap of difference.

Her two companions were worse than useless. Tally reported their position and computed impact velocity every few seconds, in a loud, confident voice that made her want to scream, while Dulcimer, the "Master Pilot of the spiral arm" who claimed to thrive on danger, had screwed himself down tight into a moaning lump of shivering green. "I'm going to die," he said, over and over. "I'm going to die. Oh, no, I don't want to die."

"Seven seconds to impact," Tally said cheerfully. "Approach velocity two kilometers a second and steady. Just listen to the wind on the hull! Four seconds to impact. Three seconds. Two seconds.
One second.
"

And then the ship stopped. Instantly—just a moment before it hit the ground. They were hovering six feet up, no movement, no deceleration, no feeling of force, not even—

"Hold tight!" Darya shouted. "Free-fall."

No feeling even of
gravity
. Dulcimer's scoutship fell free in the fraction of a second until it smacked into the surface of Genizee with a force that jarred Darya's teeth. Dulcimer rolled across the floor, a squeaking ball of green rubber.

"Approach velocity zero," E.C. Tally announced. "The
Indulgence
has landed." The embodied computer was sitting snug in the copilot's seat, neurally connected to the data bank and main computation center of the
Indulgence
. "All ship elements are reporting normal. The drive is working; the hull has not been breached."

Darya was beginning to understand why she might be ruined forever for academic life. Certainly, the world of ideas had its own pleasures and thrills. But surely there was nothing to compete with the wonderful feeling of being
alive
, after knowing without a shadow of doubt that you would be dead in one second. She took her first breath in ages and stared at the control boards. Not dead, but certainly
down
, on the surface of an alien world. A possibly hostile world. And—big mistake, Hans Rebka would have planned ahead better—not one of their weapons was at the ready.

"E.C., give us a perimeter defense. And external displays."

The screens lit. Darya had her first view of Genizee—she did not count the brief and terrifying glimpses of the surface as the ship swooped down at it faster and faster.

What she saw, after weeks of imagining, was an anticlimax. No monsters, no vast structures, no exotic scenery. The scoutship rested on a plain of dull, gray-green moss, peppered with tiny flecks of brilliant pink. Off to the left stood a broken region of fanged rocks, half hidden by cycads and tall horsetail ferns. The tops of the plants were tossing and bending in a strong wind. On the other side stretched an expanse of blue water, sparkling with the noonday lightning of sunbeams reflected from white- topped waves. Now that she could see the effects of the wind, Darya also heard it buffeting at the hull of the
Indulgence
.

There was no way of telling where the seedship had landed. The chance that a pair of ships would arrive even within sight of each other, on a world with hundreds of millions of square kilometers of land, was negligible. But Darya reminded herself that she had not
landed
—she and the
Indulgence
had
been landed
, and the same may have been true of Hans Rebka and the seedship.

"Air breathable," Tally said. "Suits not required."

"Do you have enough information to compute where the seedship made planetfall?"

Instead of replying, E.C. Tally pointed to one of the display screens that showed an area behind the
Indulgence
. A long, shallow scar in the moss revealed an area of black mud of just the right width. But there was no evidence of the ship itself.

Darya scanned the whole horizon at high resolution. There was no sign of Hans and his party. No sign of Zardalu; no sign of any animal life bigger than a mouse. Other than the disturbed area of moss, nothing suggested that the seedship was anywhere within five thousand kilometers of the
Indulgence
. And—her brain should have been working earlier, but better late than never—the message drone could be launched only when the seedship was
in orbit
. So although the ship might have landed there, it was unlikely by this time to be anywhere close-by. Rebka and the others were probably far away. What should she do next? What would Hans Rebka or Louis Nenda do in such a situation?

"Open the hatch, E.C." She needed time to think. "I'm going to take a look outside. You stay here. Keep me covered, sound and vision, but don't shoot at anything unless you hear me shout. And don't
talk
to me unless you think there's something dangerous."

Darya stepped down onto the surface, her feet sinking an inch into soft mud covered with a dense and binding thicket of moss. Close up, the bright spots were revealed as little perfumed flowers, reaching up on hair-thin stalks of pale pink from the low ground cover of the plants. Every blossom was pointing directly at the noon sun. Darya walked forward, feeling guilty as each step crushed fragile and fragrant beauty. She walked down to the shore, where the moss ended and an onshore wind was carrying long, crested breakers onto pearly sand. She sat down above the high-water mark and stared at the moving water. A few yards in front of her feet the shore was alive with inch-long brown crustaceans, scuttling frantically up and down to try to stay level with the changing waterline. If this region was typical, Genizee was a fine world on which to live, an unlikely spawning ground for the most feared species of the spiral arm.