Transvergence (3 page)

"I can't believe it. He
never
loses his temper—he doesn't know how to."

"He does now.
Julian
Graves is different from Julius or Steven. He told the Council that they are a bunch of irresponsible apes—Senior Councilor Knudsen does look just like a gorilla, I noticed that myself—who are too closed-minded to recognize a danger to the spiral arm when it's staring them in the face. And then he quit."

"He left the Chamber?"

"No. He
resigned from the Council
—something no one has ever done before. He told them that the next time they saw him, he would make them all eat their words. And
then
he left the Chamber, and took E.C. Tally with him."

"Where did he go?"

"He hasn't gone anywhere—yet. But he's going to, as soon as he can get his hands on a ship and recruit the crew he needs. Meanwhile, he's going to tell anyone who will listen about the Zardalu, and about how dangerous they are. And then he's going to look for the Zardalu. He and E.C. Tally feel sure that if the Zardalu came back anywhere in the spiral arm, they will have tried to return to their cladeworld, Genizee."

"But no one has any idea where Genizee is. The location was lost in the Great Rising."

"So we're going to have to look for it."

"We? You mean that
you'll
be going with Graves and E.C. Tally?"

"Yes." Rebka sat upright. "I'm going. In fact, I'll have to leave in just a few hours. I want to make the Council eat their words as much as Graves does. But more than that, I don't want the Zardalu to breed themselves back to power. I don't frighten easily, but they
scare
me. If they're anywhere in the spiral arm, I want to find them."

Darya stood up abruptly and moved across to the open window. "So you're leaving." It was a warm, breezy night, and the sound of rustling palm leaves blurred the hurt in her words. "You travel four days and nine light-years to get here, you've been with me only a couple of hours, and already you want to say good-bye."

"If that's all I can say." Hans Rebka had risen quietly to his feet and moved silently across the thick pile of the carpet. "And if that's all you can say, too." He put his arms around Darya's waist. "But that's not my first choice. I'm not just visiting, love. I'm recruiting. Julian Graves and I are going a long way; no one knows how far, and no one knows if we'll make it back. Can you come with us?
Will
you come with us?"

Darya glanced across to her terminal, where the remaining entries for the fifth edition were awaiting their final proofreading; and at her diary on the desk, with its heading Important Events—seminars and colloquia, publication due dates and the arrival of visiting academics, birthdays and vacations and picnics and galas and dinner parties. She went across to her desk, switched off the terminal, and closed her diary.

"When do we leave?"

The waiting rooms of Miranda Spaceport were Downside, in the ninth passenger ring twenty-six miles from the foot of the Stalk. Cleanup and maintenance was the job of the service robots, but ever since the incident when the Doradan Colubrid ambassador had accidentally been left to sit and patiently starve to death while robots dutifully dusted and mopped and polished around and over her, human supervisors had made occasional routine inspections.

One of those supervisors had been hovering around waiting room 7872, where a silent figure occupied and overflowed a couch in the room's center. Supervisor Garnoff had three times approached, and three times retreated.

He knew the life-form well enough. It was an adult Cecropian, one of the giant blind arthropods who dominated the Cecropia Federation. This one was strange in two ways. First, she was alone. The Lo'tfian slave-translator who invariably accompanied a Cecropian was absent. And second, the Cecropian had an indefinably dusty and battered look. The six jointed legs were sprawled anyhow around the carapace, rather than being tucked neatly beneath in the conventional rest position. The end of the thin proboscis, instead of being folded into a pouch on the bottom of the pleated chin, was drooping out and down onto the dark-red segmented chest.

The big question was, was she alive and well? The Cecropian had not moved since Garnoff first came on duty five hours earlier. He came to stand in front of her. The white, eyeless head did not move.

"Are you all right?"

He did not expect a spoken answer, although the Cecropian, if she was alive, undoubtedly heard him with the yellow open horns set in the middle of her head. Since all Cecropians "saw" by echolocation, sending high-frequency sonic pulses from the pleated resonator on the chin, she had sensitive hearing all through and far beyond the human frequency range.

On the other hand, she could not speak to him in any language that he would understand. With hearing usurped for vision, Cecropians "spoke" to each other chemically, with a full and rich language, through the emission and receipt of pheromones. The pair of fernlike antennas on top of the great blind head could detect and identify single molecules of the many thousands of different airborne odors generated by the apocrine ducts on the Cecropian's thorax.

But if she was alive, she must know that he was talking to her; and she should at least register his presence.

There was no reaction. The yellow horns did not turn in his direction; the long antennas remained furled.

"I said, are you all right?" He spoke more loudly. "Is there anything you need? Can you hear me?"

"She sure can," said a human voice behind him. "And she thinks you're a pain in the ass. So bug off and leave her alone."

Garnoff turned. Standing right in front of him was a short, swarthy man in a ragged shirt and dirty trousers. He needed a shave, and his eyes were tired and bloodshot. But there was plenty of energy in his stance.

"And who the devil might
you
be?" It was not the supervisor's approved form of address to Mirandan visitors, but the newcomer's strut encouraged it.

"My name's Louis Nenda. I'm a Karelian, though I don't see how that's any of your damn business."

"I'm a supervisor here. My business is making sure everything's going all right in the waiting rooms. And
she
"—Garnoff pointed—"don't look too hot to me."

"She's not. She's tired.
I'm
tired. We've come a long way. So leave us alone."

"Oh? Since when did you learn to read Cecropian thoughts? You don't know how she feels. Seems to me she might be in trouble."

The squat stranger began to stretch to his full height, then changed his mind and sat down, squeezing onto the couch next to the Cecropian. "What the hell. I got too much to do to hassle on this. Atvar H'sial's my partner. I understand her, she understands me. Here, take a look at this place from ten feet up."

He sat silent for a second, frowning at nothing. Suddenly the Cecropian at his side moved. Two of the jointed forearms reached out to grip Garnoff by the waist. Before the supervisor could do more than shout, he was lifted into the air, high above the Cecropian's great white head, and held there wriggling.

"All right, At, that's enough. Put him down easy." Louis Nenda nodded as the Cecropian gently lowered Garnoff to the floor. "Happy now? Or do you need a full-scale demo?"

But Garnoff was already backing away, out of reach of the long jointed limbs. "You can both stay here and rot, far as I'm concerned." When he was at a safe distance he paused. "How the hell did you
do
that? Talk to her, I mean. I thought no human could communicate with a Cecropian without an interpreter."

Louis Nenda shrugged without looking at Garnoff. "Got me an augment, back on Karelia. Send and receive. Cost a lot, but it's been worth it. Now, you go an' give us a bit of peace."

He waited until Garnoff was at the entrance to the waiting room, forty meters away. "You were right, At." The silent and invisible pheromonal message diffused across to the Cecropian's receptors. "They're here on Miranda, staying over in Delbruck. Both of 'em, J'merlia and Kallik."

There was a slow, satisfied nodding of the blind white head. "So I surmised." Atvar H'sial vibrated her wing cases, as though shaking off the dust of weeks of travel. "That is satisfactory. Did you establish communication?"

"Not from here. Too dangerous. We don't call 'em, see, till we know we can get to 'em in person. That way nobody can talk them out of it."

"No one will talk my J'merlia out of anything, once he knows that I am alive and present again in the spiral arm. But I accept that personal contact is preferable . . . if it can be accomplished. How do you propose that we proceed?"

"Well . . ." Louis Nenda reached into his pocket and pulled out a wafer-thin card. "That last jump pushed us down to the bottom of our credit. How far to Delbruck?"

"Two thousand four hundred kilometers, by direct flight."

"We can't afford that. What about overland?"

"How are the mighty fallen." Atvar H'sial sat crouched for a moment in calculation. "Three thousand eight hundred kilometers over land, if we avoid crossing any water body."

"Okay." It was Nenda's turn to calculate. "Three days by ground transport. Just enough for the trip, with nothing left at the end. Not even for food on the way. What do you think?"

"I do not think." The pheromones were touched with resignation. "When there is no choice, I act."

The great Cecropian untucked her six limbs. She stood erect to tower four feet above Louis Nenda. "Come. As we say in my species,
Delay is the deadliest form of denial
. To Delbruck."

It was a transformed Louis Nenda who led Atvar H'sial off the bus in Delbruck three days later. He was clean-shaven and wearing a smart new outfit of royal blue.

"Well, that worked out real nice." The pheromones grinned at Atvar H'sial while Nenda waved a serious good-bye to four gloomy passengers. He hailed a local cab sized to accommodate large aliens.

The Cecropian nodded. "It worked. But it will not work twice, Louis Nenda."

"Sure it'll work. 'One born every minute' needs updating. One born ever
second
is more like it. The arm's full of 'em."

"They were becoming suspicious."

"Of what? They checked the shoe to make sure there was no way anyone could see into it."

"At some point one of them would wonder if the shoe were equally opaque to sound." Atvar H'sial sprawled luxuriantly across the back of the cab and opened her black wing cases to soak up the sun. The delicate vestigial wings within were marked by red and white elongated eyespots.

"What if they did? They made you sit over in the back, where you were out of sight of me."

"Perhaps. But at some point one of them would have begun to wonder about pheromones, and nonverbal and nonvisual signals. I tell you, I will not repeat that exercise."

"Hey, don't start feeling
sorry
for them. They work for the Alliance government. They'll chisel it back. All it means is another microcent on the taxes."

"You misunderstand my motives." The yellow horns quivered. "I am of a race destined to build worlds, to light new suns, to rule whole galaxies. I will not again sink to such trivia. It is beneath the dignity of a Cecropian."

"Sure, At. Beneath mine, too.
And
you might get caught." Nenda peered up to the top of the building where the cab had halted. He turned to the driver. "You real sure of this address?"

"Positive. Fortieth floor and up, air-breathing aliens only. Just like the bug here." The cabbie stared down his nose at Atvar H'sial and drove off.

Nenda glared after the cab, shrugged, and led the way inside.

The air in the building was filled with a stench of rotting seaweed. It made Nenda's nose wrinkle as they entered the thirty-foot cube of the elevator. "Air-breathers! Smells more like Karelian mud-divers to me." But Atvar H'sial was nodding happily. "It is indeed the right place." The antennas on top of her eyeless white head partially unfurled. "I can detect traces of J'merlia. He has been inside this structure within the past few hours. Let us proceed higher."

Even with his augment, Nenda lacked the Cecropian's infinitely refined sensitivity to odors. He took them up floor by floor in the elevator, until Atvar H'sial finally nodded.

"This one." But now the pheromones carried a hint of concern.

"What's wrong, At?"

"In addition to traces of my J'merlia, and to your Hymenopt, Kallik . . ." She was moving along a broad corridor, and at last paused before a door tall and wide enough to admit something twice her size. "I seem to detect—wait!"

It was too late. Nenda had pressed the side plate and the great door was already sliding open. The Cecropian and the Karelian human found themselves on the threshold of a domed and cavernous chamber, forty meters across.

Nenda peered in through the gloom. "You were wrong, At. There's nobody in here."

But the Cecropian had reared up to her full height and was pointing off to the side where two figures were bent over a low table. They looked up as the door opened. There was a gasp of mutual recognition. Instead of seeing the stick-thin figure of a Lo'tfian and the tubby round body of the Hymenopt, Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial were facing the human forms of Alliance Councilor Graves and embodied computer, E.C. Tally.

"We were dumped off in the middle of nowhere . . ."

There had been half a minute of surprised and unproductive reaction—"What are you two doing here? You're supposed to be off chasing Zardalu . . ." "More to the point, what are
you
doing here? You're supposed to be thirty thousand light-years away, out on Serenity and fighting each other . . ." After a little of that, Louis Nenda had been given the floor. His pheromonal aside to Atvar H'sial—
Don't worry. Trust me!
—went unnoticed by the other two.

" . . . dumped with just the clothes we were wearing, and no warning that anything funny was going to happen. One minute we were standing in one of the main chambers, the same one where we rolled the Zardalu into the transition vortex—"