Divergence

CHAPTER 9

The hierarchy was clear in J’merlia’s mind: humans were inferior to Cecropians, but they were well above Lo’tfians and Hymenopts, who were in turn vastly superior to Varnians, Ditrons, Bercia, and the dozens of other ragtag and marginally intelligent species of the spiral arm.

That hierarchy also defined a command chain. In the absence of Atvar H’sial or another Cecropian, J’merlia would obey the orders of a human without question. He did not have to like it, but he certainly had to do as he was told.

So J’merlia had not complained when he was ordered to remain on Dreyfus-27 while the other three went off to look for Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial on the Have-It-All. All the same, he was desperately envious of Kallik. The Hymenopt was on her way to seek her master, perhaps to help him, while J’merlia stayed here making Dreyfus-27 a more habitable habitat. Suppose that Atvar H’sial needed help? Who would provide it, if J’merlia was not there? Who could even communicate with a Cecropian, via pheromonal transfer? Not Darya Lang, or Hans Rebka, or Kallik.

The cleanup operation had been given no particular starting time, so J’merlia did not feel obliged to begin at once to improve the living quarters of Dreyfus-27. Instead he remained in his suit on the rocky surface, close to the communications unit that Hans Rebka had removed from the Dreamboat.

His experiences would have to be vicarious ones, gleaned from the verbal and occasional visual messages sent back to him. That was still better than nothing, and J’merlia possessed strong interspecies empathy. He had exulted when Kallik reported the first image of the Have-It-All on the Dreamboat’s sensors. He had waited in agony when all signals suddenly became garbled during the dive to the surface of Glister. He had rejoiced when the report came of their safe landing, and when he learned of the apparently undamaged condition of Louis Nenda’s ship. He had puzzled over the anomalous physical parameters of the planetoid itself, and the presence of a swarm of energetic Phages surrounding it. And he had nodded agreement at Darya Lang’s suggestion that Glister must itself be an artifact.

The Dreamboat’s final message for the record indicated that Darya Lang was placing the ship on remote-controlled status, while she went out onto the surface of Glister to join Hans Rebka and Kallik in their direct inspection of Louis Nenda’s starship.

J’merlia shivered with excitement and anticipation. The next communication would be the crucial one. The Have-It-All seemed undamaged, and that was wonderful. But were Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial alive or dead? J’merlia waited six hours for an answer, crouched unmoving by the com unit.

The long-awaited transmission came as a voice signal — from Kallik! “Report #11031,” she began. “09:88:3101. Unit ID R-86945.”

Louis Nenda’s ID. So the Have-It-All was certainly in working order. But even before the real message began, J’merlia knew from the slow and strained speech that something had gone terribly wrong.

“This is Kallik. The whereabouts of Captain Rebka and Professor Lang are unknown to me. I am alone on the surface of Glister…”

The Hymenopt gave a concise and unhappy summary of events since Darya Lang’s last message. She ended: “It is unclear whether Masters Nenda and Atvar H’sial are living or dead. The same is true of Professor Lang and Captain Rebka. Logic suggests that regardless of their condition they will be found, if anywhere near here, in the interior of Glister. I know of no way to achieve entry to the sphere. I propose to fly the Have-It-All on a low-altitude survey, seeking possible entry points. Such a discovery is a low-probability event, but I will try it before exploring more risky alternatives.”

J’merlia looked at the message-source locator. Kallik was on a planetoid in a higher orbit than Dreyfus-27, so she was steadily falling behind. In another half hour Glister would be hidden behind the curved bulk of Gargantua. Messages would become impossible for a while. Already the signal was distorted by electronic noise, faded and broken.

J’merlia switched to his own transmission mode. “Kallik. What are we going to do? The masters are gone.” His voice rose to a wail. “There is no one left to direct us!”

He waited impatiently through the three-second round-trip delay. Kallik was the smart one; she would have answers.

“I understand,” a faint voice said, “and I have the same problem. All we can do is try to imagine what the masters would want, and function accordingly. For the moment, your position is clear. You were instructed to remain on Dreyfus-27. You should do so. My own position is more… difficult.”

There was a long pause. J’merlia could guess at Kallik’s suffering, and he sympathized strongly with it. The Hymenopt had disobeyed an order from Rebka when she walked forward into the fog, but that was not the problem. J’merlia would have done the same thing, to keep humans from risk. But Kallik had then been convinced by her own safe passage that Rebka and Lang could proceed unharmed through the shining mist. She had told them so — and she had been wrong. Her action may have led to their deaths. Kallik could not sit and wait, as J’merlia was waiting. She had to find a way to atone for her mistake.

“If my survey does not reveal an entry point,” Kallik went on at last, “and I have little confidence that it will, then one other avenue is open to me. Our first attempts to penetrate the surface of Glister were unsuccessful. We could not cut into it or burn any mark in it. But the cloud that we saw came from within Glister. It emerged from an apparently solid surface. And yet when the cloud touched me, I feel sure that it possessed solid components. We tend to ascribe supernatural powers to the Builders, and therefore we ignore simple explanations. But it occurs to me that a gaseous or liquid form of surface, held to rigidity by an intense electromagnetic field, would be easy to achieve even with our technology. If that is the case, local cancellation of the field will permit entry to or exit from Glister. The instruments to explore that possibility are here, on the Have-It-All…” Her voice disappeared, then came back more weakly. “…prefer a more conventional mode of access, but… as last resort.”

The signal was going, but Kallik sounded determined again, free of J’merlia’s own sense of desolation and foreboding. Perhaps it was because she had the ships available to her, he thought. She could do something. If everyone on Glister was dead, Kallik could even fly home to seek a new master. J’merlia could not go anywhere, could not imagine any other master than Atvar H’sial. Maybe Kallik was less accustomed to slave status, with its freedom from difficult choices.

“Kallik, please call me. As soon as you can. I do not like to be alone.”

After a too-long delay: “Certainly. I will contact you… line-of-sight communication… but… fading again… six hours…”

The signal was almost gone. “If you do not hear… whatever you must… patient.” The final word was a whisper against the hiss of interference.

J’merlia huddled over the communication set. Be patient. What else could he do?

First Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda. Then Darya Lang and Hans Rebka. Everything and everyone, little by little, taken away from J’merlia.

Kallik was all he had left, the only remaining contact within hundreds of millions of kilometers. And now?

He listened and listened. She was gone.

By the standards of any normal inhabitant of Lo’tfi, J’merlia was already insane.

He had to be. Lo’tfians were communal animals. Only a crazy being could stand to be plucked out of the home environment to serve a Cecropian dominatrix as her interpreter. As far as the Cecropians were concerned, Lo’tfian slaves were selected for their ability to learn the Cecropian pheromonal form of speech; but from the Lo’tfian perspective, selection took care of itself through quite a different mechanism.

Any Lo’tfian could learn the Cecropian form of communication; with their talent for languages, that was easy. But only a few rare males, mentally off-balance to the point of madness, could bear to be yanked away from the society of the warrens.

Separation was worse than it could ever be for a human. When Lo’tfi was first discovered by the Cecropians, the dominant species roaming the surface of that planet possessed intelligence without technology. For millions of years, male Lo’tfians had lived most of their pleasant and peaceful lives out under the clear, cold skies of Lo’tfi. They had minimal intellectual curiosity. Any difficult decisions were made for them by the blind females, snuggled away in the burrows. The food-seeking males had seen the stars, but incuriously, as an element of the world that told them only when certain plants would be available to collect.

The arrival of the Cecropians, bearing the news that around those bright points of light circled other worlds populated by other beings, had been received with tolerant disinterest by the burrow females. They had little interest in the surface, and even less in what lay beyond. Communication had been established at a leisurely pace. The Cecropians, it transpired, had no interest in conquering the planet, or in living there. They hated those cold, clear skies. And they did not want to exploit Lo’tfi. The Cecropian terms for peaceful coexistence were simple. All they sought were beings with the sense organs to understand human sonic and Cecropian pheromonal speech, and the intelligence to learn both forms of language.

The loss of a small number of surplus Lo’tfian males, as the only price for being left alone, was acceptable to the negotiators — and anyway, argued the burrow females making the deal, wasn’t anyone crazy enough to go of bad breeding stock, even if he stayed?

J’merlia had left Lo’tfi, to become servant and interpreter to Atvar H’sial. In Lo’tfian terms he was therefore demented already. Now he was contemplating an action that would put his previous insanities into the shade.

Six hours. Twelve hours. Twenty. And never a signal from Kallik, or anyone else. Never a reply to his own, increasingly frantic, messages.

The orbits of Dreyfus-27 and Glister had passed and re-passed. At first J’merlia had been able to force himself to set the unit into recording mode while he did a little work on the interior of Dreyfus-27. As the hours passed, the urge to remain near the communicator became stronger and stronger.

At thirty hours he had waited as long as he could stand. Hans Rebka had told him to remain on Dreyfus-27. Kallik had told him the same thing. But they and Darya Lang were in danger.

The Summer Dreamboat was already in remote-controlled status. He used the communicator to bring it on a maximum-velocity trajectory to Dreyfus-27.

The ship ran the gauntlet of the Phage belt and arrived with another dent in the hull from a glancing blow. J’merlia gave it one moment’s inspection to make sure the damage was superficial, then boarded the Dreamboat and set a least-time return course.

No messages came in during the flight back to Glister. In his preoccupation with the problem at hand, J’merlia did not think to send any record of his decision to abandon Dreyfus-27 in favor of a trip to the planetoid.

At two thousand kilometers Glister became visible. So did the matrix of pinpoint lights whirling in orbit around the little sphere. J’merlia gripped the controls himself, ready to override the collision avoidance system if he had to. The computer was ready for the free-fall trajectories of natural bodies, not the directed attack of energetic Phages; Kallik might have been able to devise alternative programs in the time available, but J’merlia certainly could not.

Two hundred kilometers. There was a jerk of violent acceleration. A close approach — near enough to stare down a Phage’s dark pentagonal maw as it whizzed past only forty meters away. Eighty kilometers. Another, closer, miss, and a second violent thrust to the left. Fifty. The Dreamboat began decelerating so hard that J’merlia’s front claws could not move on the controls. He sat rigid, staring out of the port as the ship corkscrewed its way through a sea of Phages. He counted scores of near misses.

When he was convinced that the ship was doomed, they were suddenly clear and in the final moments of descent. The whine of overstressed engines died to a high-pitched whisper. J’merlia, already in his suit, activated the display screens for an all-around look at the surface.

Nothing. No orange shimmer, no moving humans, no sign of the Have-It-All.

But from his position close to the surface he could see less than one percent of the surface of the planetoid, and during the flight down there had been no time for a visual search. Maybe Kallik and the other ship were just a few hundred meters away, hidden behind the curve of Glister. And Kallik had been wrong. That surface was not totally featureless. He could see something, a slate-gray mass peeping above the horizon.

According to Kallik and Hans Rebka, the atmosphere outside was breathable. But according to them, the whole place was safe. J’merlia put his suit to full opacity and stepped outside. He started to walk across the smooth surface toward the drab surface lumpiness.

Halfway there he paused. Was that thing what it seemed to be? He stared for a long time, then turned his lemon-colored compound eyes upward. Was it imagination, or were they moving still lower and faster than Darya Lang’s report had suggested?

He turned and went back to the Dreamboat, placing the ship into full self-protect mode.

On the surface once more, he again began to walk around the curve of Glister. That crumpled mass might have been there when the others arrived on the planetoid, hidden beyond the horizon. It might have been there for a million years. J’merlia certainly hoped so.

But it might be a very recent and ominous addition. Every few steps, he found himself pausing to scan the sky.

Was it? It certainly looked that way, although every Builder specialist swore one would never be found in a substantial gravity field.

The closer he came, the more the object he was approaching looked like the gray remnant of a shattered Phage.