Divergence

CHAPTER 11

The following facts were deemed too anecdotal for the formality of the Universal Catalog (Subclass: Sapients). Few beings of the spiral arm, however, would dispute them:

AN ADULT HYMENOPT HAS REFLEXES TEN TIMES AS FAST AS ANY HUMANS.

A HYMENOPT CAN RUN A HUNDRED METERS IN LESS THAN TWO SECONDS.

USED IN CONCERT, A HYMENOPT’S EIGHT TRIPLE-JOINTED LEGS WILL PROPEL HER TEN METERS INTO THE AIR UNDER TWO STANDARD GRAVITIES.

THE RETRACTED YELLOW STING IN THE END OF A HYMENOPT’S STUBBY ABDOMEN CAN BE READIED IN A FRACTION OF A SECOND TO DELIVER STIMULANTS, ANESTHETICS, HALLUCINOGENS, OR LETHAL NEUROTOXINS. THEY ARE EFFECTIVE ON ALL KNOWN INTELLIGENT ORGANISMS.

WITH VOLUNTARILY REDUCED METABOLISM, A HYMENOPT CAN SURVIVE FOR FIVE MONTHS WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER; ENCYSTED, SHE WILL ENDURE FOR FOUR TIMES AS LONG.

A HYMENOPT IS AS INTELLIGENT AS A CECROPIAN OR A HUMAN, WITH MORE MENTAL STAMINA THAN EITHER.

Kallik, of course, knew all these things. And yet it never occurred to her that her own slave status was in any way unnatural. In fact, she thought it inevitable. Her race memory extended back well over ten thousand years, to the time when every Hymenopt had been a slave.

Hymenopt race memory lacked the precision of nerve-cell memory. The few billion bits available for its total storage reduced recollection to a mere caricature of the original direct experience. Yet the brain, insistent on offering race memories in the same format as other experiences, clothed the skeleton of recollection in a synthetic flesh of its own creation.

Thus, Kallik “remembered” the long enslavement of her species as a series of visual flashes; but no amount of effort would make those images detailed. If she made the attempt, the result was the product of her own imagination.

She could make a picture in her mind of the Zardalu, the land-cephalopod masters who had ruled the thousand worlds of the Zardalu Communion until the Great Rising. If she thought hard, she could make specific images: of stony beaks, big and strong enough to crush a Hymenopt’s body… but she could not see how they fitted to the Zardalu body. Of huge, round eyes… but they were floating free and disembodied, high above her head. Of hulking bodies, girthed with supporting straps and slick with fatty secretions that allowed the Masters to survive on land… but the legs that carried those bodies were vague shadow legs, undefined in size, color, or number.

She had only the most confused memory of the disappearance of the Zardalu: her mind fed back a whirl of flying bodies, a green fire, a world turned black, a sun exploding. And then, great calm; an absence of all Zardalu images.

For Kallik’s social class, the Great Rising and the vanishing of the tyrant Zardalu brought little change. She had been born a Worker; had she remained on the Homeworld she would have remained one. Her role would always have been Worker, rather than Regent, Recorder, Defender, Feeder, or Breeder. She had been bred for slavery, born for slavery, raised for slavery, and sold for slavery. Nothing made her so uncomfortable as a total absence of masters. She needed them — humans, Cecropians, or Hymenopts.

The disappearance of Lang and Rebka stimulated her to frantic activity. She moved at once to make a low-altitude survey of the surface of Glister, traversing the slowly rotating planetoid on a path that would allow a close inspection of every square meter.

The survey took over an hour. It was wasted time. Kallik remained convinced that Glister was hollow, but the sphere showed no trace of external structure. Nothing suggested a way to reach the hidden interior. If fact, if Kallik had not seen, with her own multiple pairs of black eyes, that sparkling cloud absorbed into the surface, she would have judged Glister’s exterior totally impermeable.

When the futile ground survey was over Kallik raised her eyes again to scan the heavens far above the ship. She was no nearer finding Rebka and Lang, and — ominously — the Phages were no longer remaining at a safe distance. The presence of the Have-It-All, moving in its survey orbit around the planetoid, seemed to madden them. Three times Kallik had seen a Phage dropping in on a trajectory that carried it to within a couple of kilometers above the ship. Each approach came a little closer. Now she could see two more Phages, dropping in low.

She returned the Have-It-All to the surface of Glister, roughly where they had first found it, and went to her own quarters. The time for tentative measures was past. She selected equipment and carried it down from the ship to the surface. It would measure the E-M field associated with Glister and compute an external field to cancel it in magnitude and phase.

She sent a terse message to Opal, explaining what she was about to do. She could not signal to J’merlia, since Dreyfus-27 was still shielded by the mass of Gargantua.

Kallik dragged the field generator and inhibitor forty meters away from the Have-It-All. She had one more problem to solve. If she focused the field on the surface with a five- or ten-meter effective range, the device itself would sink through into Glister if the surface became fluid or gaseous. The only way to prevent that was to run a pair of lines attached to the generator right around the body of the sphere, one following a geodesic around the “equator” and the other a geodesic over the “poles.” Downward forces would then be held by tension in the cables, and supported by the surface strength of the whole of Glister.

Kallik paused for thought.

The lines would be supported, unless of course the local field cancellation somehow caused a global cancellation. Then Glister would become a ball of gas or liquid, and Kallik, the Have-It-All, and the Summer Dreamboat would plunge together into the unknown interior.

A Hymenopt had no shoulders to shrug. Instead, Kallik clucked and chirped softly to herself while she made the final connections of the thin, dislocation-free cables to the field generator. She was a fatalist. So Glister might become liquid. Well, no one ever promised that life would be risk-free. She hurried back to the Have-It-All and left a message for J’merlia on the recorder of the ship, the equivalent of “So long, it’s been nice knowing you.” If she returned safely, she could erase it.

She turned on the power, stood back, and watched.

The result was at first disappointing. The generator was a compact device, operating with microwave energy beamed from the Have-It-All. There was nothing to show that it was in operation, and the equipment stood exactly as she had left it, with no sound or movement.

Then she heard it; a faint creaking of the thin, tight-strung cables, protesting as they took up the strain of the generator’s weight. The unit itself stood on three solid legs, but now the bottom few centimeters of those legs were invisible. They had sunk through into the surface of Glister.

Kallik moved cautiously toward the field generator. Its position was stable, moving neither downward nor upward. She touched one of the taut support lines, estimating the tension. From the feel of it, the generator would have dropped right on through without them. The surface looked subtly different for a radius of about five meters from the field’s center, where the support lines bent downward and disappeared.

Kallik reached down. Her forelimb penetrated the gray surface, but she felt nothing.

She had brought with her from the ship half-a-dozen spent power canisters. She lobbed one to land by the field generator. The surface did not change in appearance, but the metal canister vanished at once and without a trace. The absence of ripples around the point of disappearance argued for a gaseous rather than a liquid region around the generator.

Kallik retreated a couple of steps. So it would swallow a power canister easily, and perhaps a Hymenopt with no more difficulty. But was the canceled field zone deep enough to provide true access to the interior? Or did it come to a solid bottom, a few meters down?

Kallik knew that she would not find answers by standing and thinking about it.

She went back to the ship and procured another length of cable, securing it first to a brace on the Have-It-All’s main hull and then cinching it around her own midriff. If someone came along and decided to fly the Have-It-All off on an interplanetary mission while Kallik was down inside Glister, she would be in deep trouble.

But she was in deep trouble anyway.

She moved to the edge of the zone of change. For a few seconds she paused there, hesitating. There was no guarantee that what she was doing would help Darya Lang and Hans Rebka — still less that it was the best way to help them. If there was a better solution, it was her duty to find it.

As she stood thinking there was a whoosh! of disturbed air not far overhead. It was a Phage, hurtling by no more than fifty meters from the surface. The dark maw was closed, but it could open in a few seconds.

Kallik whistled an invocation to Ressess-tress, the leading non-deity of the Hymenopts’ official atheism. She blinked all her eyes, stepped forward, and dropped through into the impalpable surface of Glister.