Summertide

CHAPTER 5 Summertide minus thirty

Darya Lang had a terrible sense of anticlimax. To come so far, to steel herself for confrontation and danger and exciting new experiences… and then to be left to cool her heels for days on end, while others decided when — and if — she would be allowed to undertake the final and most crucial part of her journey!

No one in the Alliance had suggested that her task on Quake would be easy. But also no one had suggested that she might have trouble reaching Opal’s sister world once she got to the Dobelle system. So far she had not even even seen Quake, except from a distance. She was stuck on Opal’s Starside for an indefinite period, with nothing to do, only short-range transportation available to her, and no say in what happened next.

Perry had given her a whole building to herself, just outside the spaceport. He had assured her that she had complete freedom to wander as she chose, talk to anyone she liked, and do anything that she wanted to.

Very kind of him. Except that there was no one else in the building, and nothing there but living quarters — and he had told her to be available to meet as soon as he returned. He and Rebka were sure to be away for days. Where was she supposed to go? What was she supposed to do?

She called maps of Opal onto the display screens. To anyone accustomed to the fixed continents and well-defined land-water boundaries of Sentinel Gate, the maps were curiously unsatisfying. The ocean floor contours of Opal were shown as permanent planetery features, but they seemed to be the only geographic constants. For the Slings themselves she could find no more than the present positions and drift rates of a couple of hundred of the largest of them; plus — an unsettling set of data — the approximate thickness and estimated lifetime of each Sling. At the moment she was standing on a layer of material less than forty meters deep, with a thickness that changed unpredictably every year.

She turned off the display and sat rubbing her forehead. She did not feel good. Part of it might be the reduced gravity, only four-fifths of standard here on Opal’s Starside. But maybe part of it was disorientation produced by rapid interstellar travel. Every test insisted that the Bose Drive produced no physical effects on humans. But she recalled the inhabitants of the old Arks, who permitted themselves only subluminal travel and claimed that the human soul could travel no faster than light-speed.

If the Ark dwellers were correct, her soul would be a long time catching up with her.

Darya went to the window and stared up at Opal’s cloudy sky. She felt lonely and very far from home. She wished that she could catch a glimpse of Rigel, the nearest supergiant to Sentinel Gate, but the cloud layer was continuous. She was lonely, and she was also annoyed. Hans Rebka might be an interesting character, and interested in her — she had seen the spark in his eyes — but she had not come so far to have all her plans thwarted by the whim of some back-world bureaucrat.

The way she was feeling, it would be better to walk around the Sling than to remain cooped up inside the low, claustrophobic building. She went outside, to find that a steady drizzle was beginning to fall. Exploration of the Sling on foot in those conditions might be difficult — the surface was uneven clumps of sedges and ferns, on a light and friable soil bound by a tight-rooted and slippery tangle of ground vines.

But she went barefoot all the time at home, and her naked toes could catch a good purchase on the tough vines. She bent down and slipped off her shoes.

The ground became more uneven outside the controlled area of the spaceport, and it was tough going. But she needed the exercise. She had traveled a good kilometer and was all set to walk for a long time when a dense clump of ferns a few meters in front of her produced an angry hiss. The tops of the plants bowed down and flattened under the weight of some large, low-slung, and invisible body.

Darya gasped and jumped backward, sitting down hard on the wet soil. Barefoot walking — or walking of any kind — suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. She scurried back to the spaceport and requisitioned a car. It had a limited flying range, but it could take her past the edge of the Sling and permit her a look at Opal’s ocean.

“You didn’t have to worry,” said the engineer who gave her the car. He was insisting on showing her how to use the simple controls, though she was quite sure she could have worked them out for herself. “Nothing bad ever makes it shoreside here, an’ people didn’t bring in nothing dangerous when she was first settled. Nothin’ poisonous here, neither. You was all right.”

“What was it?”

“Big ole tortoise.” He was a tall, pale-skinned man with a filthy coverall, a gap-toothed smile, and a very casual manner. “Weighs mebbe half a ton, eats all the time. But only ferns an’ grasses an’ stuff. You could ride on his back and he’d never notice you.”

“A native form?”

“Naw.” The short lesson on aircar use was over, but he was in no hurry to leave. “No vertebrates native to Opal. Biggest thing ashore is a kind o’ four-legged crab.”

“Is there anything dangerous out in the ocean?”

“Not to you ’n’ me. Least, not dangerous by design. When you get a ways offshore, watch for a big, green hump coming up to the surface, ’bout a kilometer across. That’ll be a Dowser. It’ll damage boats now an’ agin, but only ’cause it don’t know they’re there.”

“Suppose one came up underneath a Sling?”

“Now why’d she be dumb enough to do that?” His voice was teasing. “She come up for air and sunlight, an’ there’s none of them under a Sling. Go find yourself a Dowser — seein’ one’s a real experience. They come up a lot at this time of year. An’ you were lucky to meet that ole tortoise, you know. ’Nother few days and he’ll be off. They’re leaving extra early.”

“Where are they going to?”

“Ocean. Where else? They know Summertide is on the way, and they want to be nice an’ cozy when it comes. Must know it’s going to be extra big this year.”

“Will they be safe there?”

“Sure. Worst thing that can happen to one of ’em is he gets to sit high and dry for a while at real low tide. Couple of hours later, he’s back swimmin’.”

He stepped down from the running board on the left side of the car. “If you want to find the quickest way to the edge of the Sling, fly low an’ see where the turtles’ heads are pointing. That’ll get you straight there.” He wiped his hands on a dirty rag, leaving them as black as when he started, and gave Darya the warmest, most admiring smile. “Anyone ever tell you you walk an’ move real nice? You do. If you want company when you get back, I’ll be here. I live right near. Name’s Cap.”

Darya Lang took off wondering about the worlds of the Phemus Circle. Or was it was just in the air of Opal, the thing that led men to look at her differently? In twelve adult years on Sentinel Gate she had had one love affair, received maybe four compliments, and noticed half a dozen admiring looks. Here it was two in two days.

Well, Legate Pereira had told her not to be surprised by anything that happened outside Alliance territory. And House-uncle Matra had been a lot more explicit when he learned where she was going: “Everyone on the Circle worlds is sex-mad. They have to be, or they’d die out.”

The big turtles were not visible at the flying height she chose, but a path to the edge of the Sling was easy to find. She flew out over the ocean for a while and was gratified to see the monstrous green back of a Dowser rising from the deep. From a distance it could have been a smaller, perfectly round Sling, until the moment when the whole back opened to ten thousand mouths, and each released a hissing spout of white vapor. After ten minutes the vents slowly closed, but the Dowser remained basking in the warm surface water.

Darya realized for the first time what perfect ecological sense the Slings made on a tidal waterworld like Opal. The tides were a destructive force on worlds like Sentinel Gate, where the rising and falling ocean waters were impeded in their movement by fixed land boundaries. But here everything could move freely, with the Slings riding buoyantly on the changing water surface. In fact, although the Sling that bore Starside’s spaceport must even at that very moment be moving up or down in response to the gravitational pull of Mandel and Amaranth, it was completely at rest relative to the ocean’s surface. Any disruptive force came from third-order effects produced by its large area.

The life-forms should be equally safe. Unless a Dowser were unlucky enough to be caught in an area where extra-low tides left the ocean bed exposed, the animal should be totally unaware of Summertide.

Darya flew to a point near the edge of the Sling, far enough inland to feel comfortable, and set the car down. It was not raining there, and there was even a suggestion that the disk of Mandel might show its face through the clouds. She climbed out and looked around. It was strange to be on a world so empty of people that there was no one to be seen from horizon to horizon. But it was not an unpleasant experience. She walked closer to the edge of the Sling. The soft-stemmed, long-leaved plants that fringed the ocean were bowed down with yellow fruit, each one as big as her fist. If Cap could be believed, they were safe to eat, but that seemed like an unnecessary risk. Although her intestinal flora and fauna had been boosted on arrival by forms suited to Opal, the microorganisms inside her were probably still deciding who did what. She walked closer to the ragged boundary of the Sling, took off her shoes, and leaned forward to scoop up a handful of seawater. That much she was willing to chance.

She sipped a few drops from her palm. It was brackish, not quite sea-salt. Rather like the taste of her own blood.

The complicated chemical balance of a planet like Opal made her sit back on her haunches and think. In a world without continents, streams and rivers could not perform their steady leaching of salts and bases from upthrust deep structures. Microseepage of primordial methane and the higher hydrocarbons must occur on the seabed, with absorption taking place through the water column. The whole land-water balance had to be radically different from the world that she knew. Was it truly a stable situation? Or were Opal and Quake still evolving from their condition before that traumatic hour, forty-odd million years ago, when they had been cast into their wild new orbit around Mandel?

She walked a hundred meters inland and squatted cross-legged on a hummock of dark green.

The parent star showed as a bright patch, high in the cloud-covered sky. There would be at least another two hours of daylight. Now that she had taken a closer look at Opal, she saw it as a warm and friendly world, not at all the raging fury of her imagination. Surely humans could thrive there, even at Summertide. And if Opal was so pleasant, could its twin, Quake, be all so different?

But it would have to be very different, if her own conclusions had any validity. She stared at the gray horizon, unmarked by boats or other land, and reviewed for the thousandth time the train of analysis that had brought her to Dobelle. How persuasive were those results, of minimal least-square residuals? To her, there was no way that such a precise data fit could occur by coincidence. But if the results were so persuasive and indisputable to her, why had others not drawn the same conclusions?

She came up with only one answer. She had been helped in her thinking because she was a stay-at-home, a person who had never traveled between the stars. Humanity and its alien neighbors had become conditioned to think of space and distances in terms of the Bose Drive. Interstellar travel employed a precise network of Bose Nodes. The old measure of geodesic distance between two points no longer had much significance; it was the number of Bose Transitions that counted. Only the Ark dwellers, or perhaps the old colonists creeping along through Crawlspace, would see a change in a Builder artifact as generating a signal wavefront, expanding out from its point of origin and moving across the galaxy at the speed of light. And only someone like Lang, fascinated by everything to do with the Builders, might ask if there were single places and times where all those spherical wavefronts intersected.

Each piece of the argument felt weak, but taken together they left Darya fully persuaded. She felt a new anger. She was in the right place — or would be, if she could just leave Opal and get herself over to Quake! But instead she was stuck in a sleepy dreamland.

Sleepy dreamland. Even as those words formed in her mind there came a grating whirr from behind. A figure from a nightmare flew through the air and landed right in front of her, its six jointed legs fully extended.

If Darya did not cry out, it was only because her throat refused to function.

The creature standing in front of her lifted two of its dark-brown legs off the ground and reared up to tower over her. She saw a dark-red, segmented underside, and a short neck surrounded by bands of bright scarlet-and-white ruffles. That was topped by a white, eyeless head, twice the size of her own. There was no mouth, but a thin proboscis grew from the middle of the face and curled down to tuck into a pouch on the bottom of the pleated chin.

Darya heard a high-pitched series of chittering squeaks. Yellow open horns in the middle of the broad head turned to scan her body. Above them a pair of light-brown antennas, disproportionately long even for that great head, unfurled to form two meter-long fans that quivered delicately in the moist air.

She screamed and jumped backward, stumbling over the grassy tussock that she had been sitting on. As she did so a second figure came in a long, gliding leap to crouch down before the carapace of the first. It was another arthropod, almost as tall but with a sticklike body no thicker than Darya’s arm. The creature’s thin head was dominated by lemon-colored compound eyes, without eyelids. They swiveled on short eyestalks to examine her.

Darya became aware of a musky smell, complex and unfamiliar but not unpleasant, and a moment later the second being’s small mouth opened. “Atvar H’sial gives greetings,” a soft voice said in distorted but recognizable human speech.

The other creature said nothing. As the first shock faded Darya was able to think rationally again.

She had seen pictures. Nothing in them had suggested such a size and menacing presence, but the first arrival was a Cecropian, a member of the dominant species of the eight-hundred-world Cecropia Federation. The second animal must be an interpreter, the lower species that every Cecropian was said to need for interaction with humankind.

“I am Darya Lang,” she said slowly. The other two were so alien that her facial expressions probably had little meaning to them. She smiled anyway.

There was a pause, and again she was aware of the unfamiliar odor. The Cecropian’s twin yellow horns turned toward her. She could see that their insides were a delicate array of slender spiral tubes.

“Atvar H’sial offers apologies through the other.” One of the jointed arms of the silent Cecropian waved down to indicate the smaller beast by its feet. “We think perhaps we startled you.”

Which had to be the understatement of the year. It was disconcerting to hear words that had originated in the mind of one being issuing from the mouth of another. But Darya knew that the seed world for the Cecropian clade, their mother planet as Earth had been the mother-planet for all humans, was a cloudy globe circling the glimmer of a red dwarf star. In that stygian environment the Cecropians had never developed sight. Instead they “saw” through echolocation, using high-frequency sonic pulses emitted from the pleated resonator in the chin. The return signal was sensed by the yellow open horns. As one side benefit, a Cecropian knew not only the size, shape, and distance of each object in the field of view, it could also use Doppler shift of the sonic return to tell the speed with which targets were moving.

But there were disadvantages. With hearing usurped for vision, communication between Cecropians had to be performed in some other way. They did it chemically, “speaking” to each other via the transmission of pheromones, chemical messengers whose varying composition permitted them a full and rich language. A Cecropian not only knew what her fellows were saying; the pheromones also allowed her to feel it, to know their emotions directly. The unfurled antennas could detect and identify a single molecule of many thousands of different airborne odors.

And to a Cecropian, any being that did not give off the right pheromones did not exist as a communicating being. They could “see” them all right, but they did not feel them. Those nonentities included all humans. Darya knew that early contacts between Cecropians and humans had been totally unproductive until the Cecropians had produced from within their federation a species with both the capability for speech and the power to produce and sense pheromones.

She pointed to the other creature, which had disconcertingly swiveled its yellow eyes so that one was looking at her and one at the Cecropian, Atvar H’sial. “And who are you?”

There was a long, puzzling silence. Finally the small mouth with its long whiskers of sensing antennas opened again.

“The name of the interpreter is J’merlia. He is of low intelligence and plays no part in this meeting. Please ignore his presence. It is Atvar H’sial who wishes to speak with you, Darya Lang. I seek discussion concerning the planet of Quake.”

Apparently Atvar H’sial used the other in the same way as the richer worlds of the Alliance employed service robots. But it would require a very complex robot to perform the translation trick that J’merlia was doing — more sophisticated than any robot that Darya had heard of, except for those on Earth itself.

“What about Quake?”

The Cecropian crouched lower, placing its two forelegs on the ground so that the blind head was no more than four feet from Darya. Thank God it doesn’t have fangs or mandibles, Darya thought, or I couldn’t take this.

“Atvar H’sial is a specialist in two fields,” J’merlia said. “In life-forms adapting to live with extreme environmental stress, and also in the Artificers — the vanished race whom humans choose to call the Builders. We arrived on Opal only a few short time units ago. Long since we sent request for permission to visit Quake near to Summertide. That permission had not yet been granted, but at Opal Spaceport we spoke to a human person who told that you plan to go to Quake also. Is this true?”

“Well, it’s not quite true. I want to go to Quake.” Darya hesitated. “And I want to be there close to Summertide. But how did you find me?”

“It was simple. We followed the emergency locator on your car.”

Not that, Darya thought. I mean, how did you know that I even existed?

But the Cecropian was continuing. “Tell us, Darya Lang. Can you arrange permission for Atvar H’sial’s visit to Quake also?”

Was Darya’s meaning being lost in translation? “You don’t understand. I certainly want to visit Quake. But I don’t have any control of the permits to go there. That’s in the hands of two men who are on Quake at the moment, assessing conditions.”

There was a brief glint of Mandel through the cloud layers. Atvar H’sial reflexively spread wide her black wing cases, revealing four delicate vestigial wings marked by red and white elongated eyespots. It was those markings, the ruffled neck, and the phenomenal sensitivity to airborne chemicals that had led the zoologist examining the first specimens to dub them fancifully “Cecropians” — though they had no more in common with Earth’s cecropia moth than with any other Terran species. Darya knew that they were not even insects, though they did share with them an external skeleton, an arthropod structure, and a metamorphosis from early to adult life-stage.

The dark wings vibrated slowly. Atvar H’sial seemed lost in the sensual pleasure of warmth. There were a few seconds of silence, until the cloud gap closed and J’merlia said, “But men are males. You control them, do you not?”

“I do not control them. Not at all.”

Darya wondered again about the accuracy with which she and Atvar H’sial were receiving each other’s messages. The conversion process sounded as though it could never work, moving from sounds to chemical messengers and back through an alien intermediary who probably lacked a common cultural data base with either party. And she and Atvar H’sial also lacked common cultural reference points. Atvar H’sial was a female, she knew that, but what in Cecropian culture was the role played by males? Drones? Slaves?

J’merlia produced a loud buzzing sound, but no words.

“I have no control over the men who will make the decision,” Darya repeated, speaking as slowly and clearly as she could. “If they deny me access to Quake, there is nothing that I can do about it.”

The buzzing sound grew louder. “Most unsatisfactory,” J’merlia said at last. “Atvar H’sial must visit Quake during Summertide. We have traveled far and long to be here. It is not thinkable to stop now. If you cannot obtain permission for us and for yourself, then other methods must be sought.”

The great blind head swung close, so that Darya could see every bristle and pore on it. The proboscis reached out to touch her hand. It felt warm and slightly sticky. She forced herself not to move.

“Darya Lang,” J’merlia said. “When beings possess a common interest, they should work together to achieve that interest. No matter what obstacles others attempt to put in their way, they should not be deterred. If you could guarantee your cooperation, there is a way that Darya Lang and Atvar H’sial might visit Quake. Together. With or without permission.”

Was J’merlia misinterpreting Atvar H’sial’s thoughts, or was Darya herself misunderstanding the Cecropian’s intention? If not, then Darya was being recruited by this improbable alien to join a secret project.

She felt wary, but caution was mixed with a thrill of anticipation. The Cecropian could almost have been reading Darya’s own earlier thcughts. If Rebka and Perry agreed to let her go to Quake, all well and good. But if not… there might be another project in the making.

And not just any project; an enterprise designed to take her to her objective — at Summertide.

Darya could hear the whistle of air as it was pumped continuously through the Cecropian’s spiracles. The proboscis of Atvar H’sial was oozing a dark-brown fluid, and the eyeless face was a demon taken from a bad childhood dream. By Darya’s side, the black, eight-legged stick figure of J’merlia was drawn from the same nightmare.

But humans had to learn to ignore appearance. No two beings who shared common thinking processes and common goals should be truly alien to each other.

Darya leaned forward. “Very well, Atvar H’sial. I am interested to hear what you have to say. Tell me more.”

She was certainly not ready to agree to anything; but surely there could be no harm in listening?