Divergence

CHAPTER 12

The Incomparable — incomparably rattly, rusty, cumbersome, and smelly — was approaching Gargantua. Birdie Kelly and Julius Graves focused their attention on the satellites and waited for a detailed view of Glister itself, while E. C. Tally stared steadily at a display of the giant planet. He had been sitting silently for fifteen hours, since the moment when the Incomparable’s sensors had provided their first good look at Gargantua.

That was fine with Birdie Kelly. Tally’s designers had recognized that the embodied computer’s body would need rest, but apparently his inorganic brain functioned continuously. Over the past three days, Birdie had been wakened from sound sleep a dozen times with a touch and a polite “May I speak?”

Eventually Birdie had lost it. “Damn it, Tally. No more questions. Why don’t you go and ask Graves something for a change? Julius and Steven between ’em know ten times as much as I do.”

“No, Commissioner Kelly, that is not true.” E. C. Tally shook his head, practicing the accepted human gesture for dissent and the conventional human pause before offering a reply. “They know much more than ten times as much as you do. Perhaps one hundred times? Let me think about that.”

The first sight of Gargantua had kept him quiet for a while. But now he was perking up and coming out of his reverie over by the display screens. To Birdie’s relief, though, he was turning to Julius Graves.

“If I may speak: with respect to the communications that we have received from Darya Lang and from Kallik. Professor Lang suggests that Glister is a Builder artifact, and Kallik agrees. Does any other evidence suggest the presence of Builder activity in the vicinity of Gargantua?”

“No. The nearest artifact to Gargantua is the Umbilical, connecting Quake and Opal.” The voice was Steven Graves’s. “And it is the only one reported in the Mandel stellar system.”

“Thank you. That is what my own data banks show, but I wondered if there might be inadequacies, as there have been in other areas.” Tally reached out and tapped the screen, where Gargantua filled the screen. “Would you please examine this and offer your opinion?”

His index finger was squarely on an orange-and-umber spot below Gargantua’s equator.

“The bright oval?” Graves asked. He looked for only a moment, then turned his attention to the other screen, where the sensors were set for analysis of a volume of space surrounding Glister. “I’m sorry. I have no information about that.”

But to his own great amazement, Birdie did. He finally knew something that Graves did not! “It’s called the Eye of Gargantua,” he burst out. “It’s a great big whirlpool of gases, a permanent hurricane about forty thousand kilometers across.” He pointed to the screen. “You can even see the vortices on the image, trailing away from it on both sides.”

“I can see them. Do you know for how long the Eye of Gargantua has existed?”

“Not really. But it’s been around for as long as the Dobelle system has been colonized. Thousands of years. When people came out here exploring for minerals, ages ago, the survey teams all took pictures of it. Every kids’ book talks about it and has a drawing of it. It’s a famous bit of the stellar system, one of the ‘natural wonders’ you learn about in school.”

“You are speaking metaphorically. I learned nothing in school, for I did not attend it.” E. C. Tally frowned. He had been experimenting with that expression as a way of indicating a paradox or dichotomy of choice, and he felt the look had reached a satisfactory level of performance. “But knowledge is not the issue. The Eye of Gargantua should not be described to children as one of the natural wonders of the stellar system. For a good reason: it is not one.”

“Not one what?” Birdie cursed himself. He should have known better than to have jumped into a conversation with Tally.

“The Eye of Gargantua is not a natural wonder of the stellar system. Because it is not natural.”

“Then what the blazes is it?”

“I do not know.” Tally attempted another human gesture, a shrug of the shoulders. “But I know what it is not. I have been calculating continuously for the past fifteen hours, with all plausible boundary conditions. The system that we see is not a stable solution of the time-dependent, three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation for gaseous motion. It should have dissipated itself, in weeks or months. In order for the Eye of Gargantua to exist, some large additional source of atmospheric circulation must be present right there.” He touched the screen. “At the center of the eye, where you can see the vortex—”

“Phages!” Julius Graves broke in excitedly. “They’re there all right. We’re getting an image of fragments around Glister, but it’s not like the one that Rebka and Lang sent back from their first sighting. The cloud around it extends all the way down to the surface. If those are all Phages…”

“Can we fly down through them, as did Captain Rebka and Professor Lang?” Tally addressed Birdie Kelly, as the most experienced pilot. “They reached the surface safely.”

“Fly down there — in this scumbucket?” Birdie glared around at the controls and fittings of the ore freighter. “We sure as hell can’t. Take a look at us. The drive don’t work at more than half power, there’s no weapons to pop Phages with, and we’re about as mobile as a Dowser. If those are all Phages down there, and they’re half as nippy as Captain Rebka says, we’ve got problems. Maybe if they get a good sniff of this ship before they start chewing, we’ll have a chance. I know Phages are supposed to eat anything, but there have to be limits.”

“A sniff—”

“I was joking, E.C. What I mean is, we’d better stay well out of the way.”

“But we don’t have to rely on the Incomparable to get us there,” Julius Graves said. “We can use the Summer Dreamboat. It took the others safely past the Phages, and Professor Lang said in her last message that she left it on remote control. We can call it up to us, and fly it down.”

“But what about Rebka and Lang and Kallik?” Birdie did not like the assumption that they were all going down to Glister, danger or no danger. “They’ll need a ship if they want to get out of there in a hurry.”

“They’ll have one — the Have-It-All. It’s still there if they need it. And we can surely borrow the Dreamboat for a few hours. We’ll have it back to them before they even know it’s gone. But it will take a while for the Dreamboat to get here. We ought to give the command at once. So if you will please proceed, Commissioner…”

It was a Phage on the surface of Glister.

Or maybe it was best to say that it was the devastated remains of one. J’merlia had approached as closely as he cared to and confirmed that the heap of slate-gray debris contained regular pentagonal elements. But he could see nothing of organs or an internal structure, and other factors made him question that this was a Phage as they were known in the rest of the spiral arm. For one thing, Phages were supposed to be just about indestructible. This one looked as though it had hurtled vertically and at high velocity into the surface of Glister. It should have smashed a giant hole. But the impact had left no mark, or else the mark had since vanished.

What could Glister be made of, to remain unscathed after such a blow?

J’merlia lifted lemon-yellow eyes on their short eyestalks to the heavens and looked for more Phages. They were there, whipping past overhead. Lower on every pass, if he was any judge.

He trotted on, scanning the surface of Glister for anything familiar. It was less than five minutes before he came across a taut cable running from horizon to horizon. He followed it and soon saw the Have-It-All. He hurried to the ship hoping to find Kallik or the missing humans, but a quick look inside showed that the cabins were deserted; the message from Kallik confirmed that. Forty meters away stood a piece of equipment, partially sunk into Glister’s smooth gray surface. Four tight-stretched lines at ninety degrees to each other appeared to support the machine.

J’merlia decided that the lines probably ran all the way around the planetoid. There was no point in following them. He went closer to the machine and recognized it as a field monitor and inhibitor. If it was operating as Kallik had suggested, the surface around it might offer no resistance to weight. J’merlia went forward cautiously to the place where one of the lines vanished into Glister’s interior. When he placed a forelimb on the surface at that point, it went down without resistance. The smooth gray appeared totally insubstantial.

He straightened up. Another cable ran from a stout stanchion on the Have-It-All’s hull all the way to the point where it plunged into the unblemished surface by the field inhibitor. Anyone might try to climb down that rope, into the unknown gray region — or, more likely, use it as a way to return to the outside of Glister.

J’merlia went back to the ship and gave it a more thorough inspection. As when Rebka and Lang had found it, everything was in working order. Given an hour or two to familiarize himself with the controls, he could make a fair shot at flying it anywhere in the spiral arm via the Bose Network Transition Points.

Which more and more felt like a good idea. Every few minutes now he heard the whistle of Phages overhead. Something was maddening them, and that something was probably the presence of newcomers on the surface of Glister. The place was not safe anymore; even as he watched, a Phage came sailing by with open maw, no more than a hundred meters above the Have-It-All.

It was only a matter of time before some furiously energized Phage, by accident or design, made a direct hit on him or on the ship. He had to get away from the planetoid, or he would soon be of no use to anyone.

J’merlia was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with his own actions. He had come to Glister with a poorly defined idea of saving Rebka, Lang, and Kallik, and perhaps Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda. But having arrived here he had no idea what to do next. He lacked Kallik’s initiative and decisiveness. It certainly seemed a poor idea to follow her to the interior of Glister. On the other hand it was no better to stay on the surface, because that option appeared more dangerous with every minute.

J’merlia sat in the cabin of the Have-It-All and dithered.

He had had enough of this free-thinking misery; what he longed for was a master to give him directions.

His own orders had been to stay on Dreyfus-27. It was the one thing he had been told to do, and he had disobeyed. He did not want to go back to Dreyfus-27 — it was too far from Glister — but maybe he should take a good intermediate step. He could fly the Summer Dreamboat far enough from Glister to be safe from the Phages, yet close enough to monitor everything that happened on the planetoid’s surface. Then if Kallik or one of the others appeared, J’merlia could have the ship down to pick them up in a few minutes.

It was not a good solution, but it was a reasonable compromise. He hesitated for a few minutes more, until a Phage came whistling past almost close enough to grab him.

The Summer Dreamboat was no more than two minutes’ travel at a rapid trot. J’merlia closed the cabin of the Have-It-All and set off for the other ship.

He was less than a hundred meters away when it rose smoothly from the surface of Glister. As J’merlia gaped up, it hurtled away at maximum acceleration into the glimmering void above his head.