Divergence

CHAPTER 14

The unmanned Summer Dreamboat had arrived in one piece and in working order.

That was the good news. The bad news was that it had been touch and go.

Five grazing encounters with Phages had delivered hammer blows to the Dreamboat’s hull, one strong enough to dent and puncture the top of the cabin. The repair was not difficult, and Birdie Kelly was already half finished. But the significance of those five near misses was not the damage that they had done. It was what they revealed about the state of the Phages. Steven Graves and E. C. Tally had monitored the ascent of the Dreamboat and were agreed for once: the little ship’s survival, even with all collision-avoidance systems active, had been mainly a matter of luck. The Phages were more active than ever, all the way down to the surface of Glister. A descent with accelerations that humans could stand had less than a one-percent chance of success.

The Summer Dreamboat had been moved for repairs into the capacious ore hold of the Incomparable. Graves and Tally were floating free in the air-filled interior, talking and talking.

And watching me work, Birdie thought. Same as usual. The other two were long on talk, but when anything calling for physical effort came along they managed to leave all the doing to him. And they lacked a decent sense of danger. Birdie hated to work with heroes. He had listened to Steven and E. C. Tally casually talk odds of a hundred to one against, and shuddered. Fortunately, Julius Graves seemed to have more rational views.

“Those odds are totally unacceptable,” he was saying. “When you and Steven are in agreement, I am forced to listen. We cannot afford to take such a risk.”

“May I speak?”

“Which means we have a real problem,” Graves continued, ignoring Tally’s request. “J’merlia is on Dreyfus-27. Probably deep inside it, since he does not answer our calls. So he can’t help. And everyone else is on Glister. And we have no safe way of getting to them.” He paused. “Did you say something, E.C.?”

“Steven and I agreed on the probability of survival if the Summer Dreamboat simply makes a direct descent to Glister. Or rather, we disagreed in the third significant digit of the calculated result. But there are other options. It depends on the probability level which one uses to define ‘safe.’ For example, there is a technique that would raise the probability of a successful landing of the Summer Dreamboat on the surface of Glister to a value in excess of zero-point-eight-four.”

“A five-out-of-six chance of getting there in one piece?” Julius Graves glared at Tally. “Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”

“For three reasons. First, it came to me only after a review of analogous situations, of other places and times. That review was completed only thirty seconds ago. Second, the technique should provide a safe landing, but the odds of a safe subsequent ascent are incalculable without additional data concerning the surface of Glister. And third, the procedure would probably lead to the loss of a valuable asset: the Incomparable.”

“Commissioner Kelly.” Graves turned to Birdie. “The Incomparable is the property of the government of Dobelle. As the representative of the government, how would you view its possible loss?”

Birdie had finished the patch on the Dreamboat’s hull and burned his thumb doing it. He pushed himself off and glared around the Incomparable’s hold as he floated up to grab a support beam at Tally’s side.

“It’s a filthy barrel of rust and rot, it stinks like a dead ponker, and it should have been thrown on the scrap heap fifty years ago. If I never see it again, that’s too soon.”

Tally was frowning at him. “Am I to take it, then, that you would sanction the potential loss of the Incomparable?”

“In one word, matey, yes.”

“Then if I may speak, I will outline the technique. It is something that can be found in the older parts of the data banks. In old times, when human individuals wished to accomplish an objective that certain other guarding entities sought to prevent, they often employed a method known as creating a diversion…”

Agreement in principle did not guarantee agreement in practice. E. C. Tally and Steven Graves had argued endlessly about the best method. Should the Incomparable be sent in well ahead of the Dreamboat, passing through the periphery of the cloud of orbiting Phages and seeking to draw them away from Glister? Or was it better to fly the old ore freighter on a trajectory that would impact Glister, and take the Dreamboat in not far behind, relying on its being ignored in the presence of the freighter’s larger and more tempting target?

Tally and Steven Graves had finally agreed on one thing — that they had insufficient data.

“Since there is not enough information to make a reasoned choice,” Tally said apologetically to Birdie Kelly, “the only thing I can suggest is that we resort to aleatoric procedure.”

“What’s ‘aleatoric’ mean, when it’s at home?” Birdie was reaching into his jacket pocket.

“An aleatoric procedure is one that contains chance and random elements.”

“Why, that’s just the way I was thinking myself.” Birdie produced a deck of cards and shuffled it expertly. He held it out to Tally. “Pick a card, E.C., any card. Red, and the ships fly a long way apart from each other. Black, and we tuck ourselves up the old Incomparable’s tailpipe.”

Tally selected a card from the spread and turned it over. “It is black.” He had stared in great curiosity when Birdie shuffled the deck. “What you did just then — it was difficult to see, but is it designed to randomize the sequence?”

“You might say that.” Birdie gave E. C. Tally a thoughtful glance. “Didn’t you ever play cards?”

“Never.”

“If we get out of this alive, why don’t I teach you?”

“Thank you. That would be informative.”

“And don’t you worry,” Birdie patted Tally on the shoulder. “We won’t be playing for high stakes. At first.”

“That could have been us.” Julius Graves was staring straight up. “Not a comforting thought.”

They had finally decided that since the Dreamboat needed time and maneuvering space to land on Glister, it would be a mistake to have the Incomparable fly in all the way to the surface. Instead, the bigger ship had been programmed to zoom down to ten kilometers and then veer away from the planetoid, with luck luring the cloud of attacking Phages with it.

As the Dreamboat increased the power level of its drive for the last hundred-meter deceleration to the surface, the Incomparable could be seen skirting the northern horizon of Glister. The old ship was at the center of a dense cluster of marauding Phages. Already it had sustained a dozen direct hits. The drive was still flaring, but Phage maws had gouged great chunks from the body of the freighter. About twenty Phages clung to the flanks of the Incomparable, like dogs worrying an old bull.

“They’ll be back,” Julius Graves went on. “The way they’re going, they’ll have swallowed the freighter completely in another half hour. And Phages don’t get indigestion, or lose their appetite, no matter what they ingest.”

Birdie had chosen an approach trajectory to bring them no more than fifty meters from the Have-It-All, on the side of the ship away from Kallik’s field inhibitor. There had been no time to examine that installation during their descent, and would not have been even if the Dreamboat’s evasive movements from a handful of isolated Phages had been smooth enough to permit it. Now they had to hurry over to the inhibitor and decide what to do before any Phages returned to harass them.

The two men and the embodied computer had their suits set to full opacity. Kallik, Darya Lang, and Hans Rebka had certainly been able to breathe the atmosphere; and just as certainly, they had disappeared from the surface of Glister. Their vanishing and failure to reappear was unlikely to be the result of Glister’s air — but it could be. As E. C. Tally pointed out, quoting from the most ancient part of the data banks, “Taking a calculated risk, sir, does not oblige one to act rashly.”

While Graves and Tally went on to the site of the field inhibitor, Birdie took a quick look inside the Have-It-All. He headed first for the control room. The ship was untouched, ready to fly within a few seconds of giving the command. That gave Birdie his first warm feeling for quite a while. He patted the control console and hurried back outside.

He had half expected to see the surface of Glister littered with crashed Phages, but there were only two crumpled remains in sight. Did they lose interest if no organic life-forms were present? That was a new thought — though not an encouraging one, to an organic life-form.

Birdie followed the stretched cable from the Have-It-All’s stanchion to the place where Graves and E. C. Tally were standing. Tally had his hand on the line, close to the point where it disappeared into the gray surface, and he was tugging on it vigorously. As Birdie came up to them Tally released the cable, reached down, and pushed his hand easily into the slate-colored plane.

“Observe,” he said. “The field inhibitor is still operating, with near-perfect field cancellation. The surface offers negligible resistance to the penetration of my hand, and at this point it must, I think, be a weakly secured gaseous form. But the cable itself offers considerable resistance to its own withdrawal. We conclude that it must be secured at its lower end, within the interior of Glister.”

“In other words,” Graves said, “it’s tied to something.”

Now that he was close enough, Birdie could see that the surface for a radius of a few meters around the field inhibitor appeared slightly indistinct. And the legs of the inhibitor equipment stood not on Glister, but buried a few centimeters in that hazy gray.

“So who shall be first?” Graves asked.

“First for what?” But Birdie knew the answer to that question before he asked it. The one thing that made no sense was to come all the way here, run the gauntlet through that belt of aggressive Phages, and then sit and wait for the same Phages to come back and dive-bomb them. The only way to go was down, into that gray horridness.

Tally had taken hold of the cable without waiting for discussion. “It is possible that I will be unable to return messages to you through the suit communications system,” he said calmly. “However, when I reach a point where it is appropriate for another to descend, I will strike the cable — thus.” He hit it with the palm of his suited hand. “Feel for the vibration.”

He pushed his feet over the edge and swung hand-over-hand down the cable. His body disappeared easily into a gray opacity. When only his head showed above the smoky surface he paused.

“It occurs to me that my words leave the required action for some possible future situation inadequately defined. A contingency may arise in which I become unable to strike the cable in the manner that I described. If I do not signal in a reasonable time, say, one thousand seconds, you should assume that contingency.”

“Don’t worry your head about that,” Birdie said. “We’ll assume it.”

“That is satisfactory.” E. C. Tally disappeared completely. A second later his head popped up again from the gray haze. “May I ask, if I do not signal in one thousand seconds, what action you propose to take?”

Birdie stared off to the horizon. The hulk of the Incomparable had vanished — devoured, or flown far away, he could not tell. There was a cloud of glittering motes visible in the same direction. The same Phages, probably, sensing motion on the surface of Glister and coming back for another go at it.

Except that these Phages were not interested in the surface of Glister. They wanted to have a go at humans. At him.

“I don’t know what action we’ll take, E.C.,” Birdie said. “But don’t be surprised if it happens before you count out your thousand seconds.”

The cable went down ten meters through gray obscurity, then emerged into a spherical region with another gray floor and a ceiling above it that glowed with cold orange light.

Birdie clung to the line, high up near the ceiling, and peered downward.

It was a long drop — a horrid long drop, for somebody from a planet where the buildings were never more than a couple of stories high; and there was no sign of E. C. Tally down there. But the cable went on, straight downward, into the floor.

Birdie slightly relaxed the grip of his hands and knees and continued his controlled descent. When he came to the part of the second floor where the line ran through, that surface proved just as insubstantial as the first one. The field inhibitor had been focused downward, and for all Birdie knew, its effect went right through Glister and out the other side. He allowed himself to drop on through. Somewhere above him, Julius Graves was waiting for his signal, as he had waited for E. C Tally’s. But this was no time to give it, suspended in midair.

The gray fog filled his nose and mouth, passing through his supposedly sealed suit as though it did not exist. The gas was thin, tasteless, and odorless, and it did not interfere with Birdie’s breathing. In another ten meters he was through that and dropping again toward a spherical surface.

This level was more promising. There were structures and partitions and webs, dividing the space into giant, oddly-shaped rooms. Birdie was coming down into one of the bigger open areas. He released the line with his crossed legs, let go with his hands, and dropped the last few feet. The gravity was more than he had realized. He landed heavily and flopped backward to a sitting position. Before he stood up he took a quick look around.

Dull gray walls. A jumble of nets and unconnected support lines on the floor, right by his side. He was sitting on a length of flexible netting, springy enough to be a bed. The cable he had come down ran off to the right, to a descending ramp that became part of a brightly lit tunnel.

Off on that right side — he stopped, stared, and stared again. On that right side, close to the entry to the downward ramp, was E. C. Tally.

And crouched next to him, eight legs splayed, was J’merlia.

Birdie scrambled to his feet. The Lo’tfian was supposed to be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, on Dreyfus-27. What was he doing here?

Birdie jerked at the line he was holding, to send a signal back to Graves that it was safe to descend, and hurried across to the other two.

“You were right about messages, E.C.,” he said. “I assume you tried to send something through your suit communicator, but we didn’t hear a thing.”

“Nor I from you. The surface is presumably impervious to electromagnetic signals, though it permits material objects to pass through with no difficulty.” E. C. Tally gestured to J’merlia. “It is not necessary for you to introduce the two of us, Commissioner Kelly. We have already done that. Although J’merlia and I never met before, I recognized the Lo’tfian form from stored records.”

“That’s as may be. But what’s he doing here? Why aren’t you over on Dreyfus, J’merlia, the way Captain Rebka’s messages said you would be?”

“I beg forgiveness for that act. I came to Glister to seek the masters, Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda, and also the Hymenopt Kallik. But when I was on the surface, I was forced to seek refuge in the interior from the attack of Phages. The ship that I had arrived in, the Summer Dreamboat, took off from the surface and left me helpless.”

“Sorry, J’merlia, that was our doing — we needed it to come down in. But you were a bit ambitious, wouldn’t you say, looking for Nenda and H’sial and Kallik? Seeing as how we’ve all no idea where any one of them is. You’d have been better off staying on Dreyfus, out of harm’s way. Phages are bad news.”

“With apologies, Commissioner Kelly. The Phages are, as you say, amazingly aggressive. It was unwise of me to come here. But there is good news also. I know where the masters are! And the Hymenopt Kallik. They are all three together, in a chamber closer to the center of Glister.”

“I can’t believe it.” Birdie turned to E. C. Tally. “Is J’merlia telling the truth?”

“I have no direct evidence that supports his statement. But if you will accept indirect evidence, according to the central data banks the species that lead the spiral arm in deliberate falsehood are humans and Cecropians. Everyone else, including J’merlia and all Lo’tfians, is far behind.”

“With respect, Commissioner Kelly, you may verify that I speak the truth. All you need to do is act as I did — follow the cable. It led me all the way from the surface, to were the masters and Kallik can be found.”

“Which would certainly be direct evidence.” E. C. Tally gestured to Birdie. “Go ahead, Commissioner, with J’merlia. When Councilor Graves joins me we will come after you. The cable provides an unambiguous trail for us to pursue.”

Birdie found himself following the thin figure of J’merlia down an angled and jointed tunnel, whose sudden changes of direction made his head spin. The tunnel branched occasionally, and parts were so dimly lit that the walls could not be seen, but J’merlia followed the thin line wherever it led. Birdie trailed along behind, his hand touching the Lo’tfian’s back. Their emergence into a giant domed chamber came as a shock.

The downward-curving floor formed a shallow circular bowl, marked off in concentric rings of pure color. Under the brilliant overhead light their reflection hurt the eyes. From the meeting place of each pair of rings rose insubstantial hemispheres, arching up over the middle of the chamber. The line that J’merlia had been following led toward that center, straight as a spoke on a wheel. Halfway in it stopped. Kallik was lying on the floor there, a compact dark bundle on the boundary between a purple and a red ring. In two front paws she held the spool for the line, and the other end had been wrapped securely around her body.

And beyond Kallik’s unconscious form…

The innermost ring was blue, purest blue, a monochromatic 0.47-micrometer blue. At its center stood a raised dais of the same color, with a dozen glassy seats upon it. In two of those seats lolled the unmistakable forms of Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial.

Birdie started forward. He was restrained by J’merlia’s grip on his sleeve.

“With respect, Commissioner, it may be unwise to proceed farther.”

“Why? They don’t look dead, just unconscious. But they could be in bad shape. We have to get ’em out and take care of them, soon as we can.”

“Assuredly. My first reaction was the same as yours, that I must proceed at once and rescue the masters. But then I thought to myself, the Hymenopt Kallik surely operated with the same imperative. She saw the masters, she went forward toward them — and she did not reach them. When I realized that, I also realized that the worst way for me to serve the masters would be to become unconscious, as they are. I returned for safety to the second outer chamber. I had formulated no safe plan of action when the human, E. Crimson Tally, appeared.”

“He’s not a human. Tally’s an embodied computer.” Birdie did not go into details. He was too busy thinking about the other things that J’merlia had said.

“Why didn’t you just grab hold of the line and pull Kallik out?” he went on. “She doesn’t weigh much.”

“I was unable to do so, Commissioner. Try it, if you wish.”

Birdie seized the end of the line and heaved, as hard as he could. Kallik did not move a millimeter, and the line inside the pattern of rings did not even leave the floor. It was held there, fused to the surface or secured by some form of field. Birdie was still tugging and swearing when E. C. Tally and Julius Graves arrived.

There were five minutes of questions, suggestions, and counter-suggestions. At the end of it no one had bettered J’merlia’s first proposal: that it was safe to do now what he had been reluctant to do before. He would enter the hemispheres and attempt to retrieve Kallik. If he failed, for any reason, the others would be on hand to help him. He would wear a line around him, so that if he became unconscious he could be pulled out.

“Which we know doesn’t work for Kallik,” Birdie said.

But he had no better ideas. They all watched in silence as J’merlia walked forward steadily, passing through the yellow and green rings and half of the purple one. At that point he hesitated. The thin head began to turn, and the pale yellow eyes on their short eyestalks moved dreamily from side to side.

“J’merlia!” Julius Graves shouted at him — loudly. The Lo’tfian stared around in a vague and puzzled way. He folded his thin hind legs and began to sit down.

“That’s enough!” Graves was already pulling on the line. “Get him out, quick — while he can still stand.”

J’merlia came reeling back from inside the pattern of rings. At the edge of the green annulus he jerked up to his full height and peered around him, but he allowed the others to haul him all the way out. On the edge of the yellow ring he sank down to his belly.

“What happened?” Tally asked. “You were progressing well, and then you halted.”

“I don’t remember.” J’merlia crouched down on all his limbs and turned his eyestalks to stare back into the circle. “I was going in. Steadily, without difficulty. And then all at once I was going out, facing the other direction and being pulled clear.”

“A Lotus field.” Graves was nodding his head soberly. “Once Darya Lang pointed out that Glister is a Builder creation, we might have expected it. There are Lotus fields on many artifacts. The most famous one surrounds and protects Paradox. But J’merlia is lucky — he was exposed to only peripheral-field strength. Only the most recent of his memories were erased.”

“Which may not be true of Kallik,” E. C. Tally said. “And still less of Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial. The Lotus field of Paradox erases all memories.”

“From men,” J’merlia said, “and from Lo’tfians and Hymenopts. But from machines? Or from computers?”

The others turned to look at E. C. Tally. He nodded. “According to the records, all memories are lost in Paradox, from Organics or Inorganics. However.” He bent down to release the line from J’merlia and place it around his own body. “However, this is not Paradox. The Lotus field here may not be the same. An experiment is in order.”

They watched in silence as he cautiously stepped into the yellow ring, then passed across the five-meter band that led to the green. In the middle of the green annulus he paused and looked back.

“I feel some slight disturbance of circuits.” His voice was calm. “It is not enough to inhibit performance, nor to prevent my further progress. I will proceed.”

He walked on, descending across the shallow bowl of the floor. Five paces short of the place where J’merlia had faltered, he paused again.

“I must return.” His voice had become halting and slow. “I cannot retain information. It is being destroyed in both current and backup files… I record a loss of fourteen thousand sectors in the past three seconds.” He turned and took one hesitant step away from the center. Then he seemed to freeze.

“Twenty-three thousand more sectors are gone,” he said dreamily. “The rate is increasing.”

“That’s enough.” Graves heaved on the line, and Tally came bobbing and weaving back to the periphery of the chamber. At the edge he halted and shook off Birdie Kelly’s supporting hands.

“Do not worry, Commissioner Kelly. I have lost some data — all recent — but I am still fully functional. Most of my stored memory has not been affected.”

“But we’ve answered the main question,” Graves said. “The field is just as effective on organic or inorganic memories. So we can’t get them out — any of them.”

“We must.” J’merlia stood up and made a movement as though he was ready to run back toward the middle of the chamber. “The masters are in there! Kallik is there! We cannot abandon them.”

“I am sorry, J’merlia.” Graves walked across to place himself between the Lo’tfian and the silent forms at the center of the room. “If we could do something to help Kallik and the others, we would — even though Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda tried to kill us, back on Quake. But we can’t do a thing to get them out.”

“That statement is plausible, but not proven.” E. C. Tally had been standing motionless. Now he raised his hands to touch the sides of his head. “I would like to question it. When I was receiving my original indoctrination, before I set out for Dobelle, there were calibration problems. To make the required adjustments, it was necessary to remove my brain.”

Tally ignored Birdie Kelly’s gasp of horror. He was feeling carefully around his temples. “I pointed out to the technicians at the time that my embodied design was intended for continuous sensory input. They employed a neural bundle connecting my brain to my spine. I lost sensory feeds and body control for a few seconds as the attachment was being made, but I was otherwise unaffected. Now, my observations suggest that J’merlia is the strongest and most agile of us. If he were to ascend the cable all the way to the surface, enter the Have-It-All, and return with a long high-capacity neural cable…”

Birdie Kelly had never seen anything so disgusting in his whole life. And that was saying something.

E. C. Tally lay on his side on the gently curving floor, eyes closed. A coil of high-capacity cable lay by him. His head was supported on a folded blanket taken from the Have-It-All, and he was giving calm directions to Julius Graves and J’merlia.

“The skull is of course real bone, and the skin was grown naturally. But for convenience of access the blood vessels were terminated in the rear section, on a line one centimeter above my ears. The blood supply to the upper skull has been rerouted to veins and arteries in my forehead. The upper cranium is hinged at the front and secured with a line of pins at the back. You will see the access line when the hair is lifted. If you raise the skin at the back you should see the pressure points, marked in blue on the bone.”

Graves inserted a thin spatula into the horizontal gap a few inches above E. C. Tally’s rear hairline. As he levered upward there was a gleam of white bone. Three blue dots were revealed on the smooth rear of the skull.

“I see them. Three of them?”

“That is correct. Very good. When those pressure points are simultaneously depressed, the rear pins release. You will find that the whole upper cranium lifts forward about the hinged line in the forehead. The skin, veins, and arteries there should stretch, but they will remain intact above the hinged region.” When Graves hesitated, Tally added, “Do not concern yourself about my sensations. Naturally, the warning signals that you know as pain have been modified in my case. I will feel nothing that you recognize as discomfort.”

Graves nodded, and while J’merlia held the spatula in position he reached in and pressed the three marked places on the white bone. There was a sharp click. The rear part of the skull jerked upward a couple of millimeters, revealing a narrow dark slit.

“That looks like poor design,” Graves said. “Isn’t there a danger that the release could be triggered accidentally?”

“Not while I am functional. I must cooperate, or be incapable of internal state transitions, before the release can take place. Now — grasp the rear hair and lift the upper cranium, rotating it about the forward hinge.”

The whole cap of the skull eased upward under Graves’s gentle pressure. Birdie saw the inside of the hemisphere, with its intricate network of red blood vessels. Below it was a bulging gray ovoid, sitting in the skull case as snugly as an egg in an eggcup.

“Very good.” Tally remained completely still. “You will now see what appear to be the meninges — the outer protective membranes of the human brain. In my case they are of course artificial. I was embodied with my own independent power supply, so there is no need for anything other than a neural body-brain interface. You will find the neural interface when you lift me out of the skull cavity. Lift me only a few centimeters, and proceed with caution. It would be undesirable to disable the interface prematurely. A strong pull would unseat the connection.”

Graves was reaching into Tally’s head and cautiously lifting out a roughly spherical object, small enough to hold comfortably in his two cupped hands. As the wrinkled ball was raised, a short coiled spiral was revealed. It ran between the bottom of the embodied computer and the lower hindbrain of E. C. Tally’s body, above the end of the spinal column. Clear liquid dripped from the coil onto Graves’s hands as the computer brain was lifted free of its body.

“Now,” Tally continued. “The next phase should be simple, but I will not be able to guide you through it. Commissioner Kelly, you and J’merlia must make sure that my body does not move — there may be some reflex muscle activity. Councilor Graves, you must break the connection between me and the body, and then connect it again through the high-capacity cable. Do it as quickly as you can, consistent with care, but do not worry if it takes a minute or two. This body’s own hindbrain will permit it to function normally for at least that long, while I am absent. Also, do not be afraid to touch the inside of the skull cavity. This body is well protected against infection. Carry on, please, as soon as you feel ready.”

Graves nodded. There was another click as he reached in and delicately separated the body and the sphere of the embodied computer. E. C. Tally’s limbs jerked against Birdie and J’merlia’s restraining grasp; then the body slumped and steadied.

The ends of the neural cable had been placed close to hand. Julius Graves picked up the male connector. After a few seconds of effort he inserted it snugly into position at the upper end of the body’s hindbrain.

“Half the job done.” He was breathing loudly through his mouth. “But the other one doesn’t want to go in. Hold him still.” Graves’s fingers were slippery with cerebrospinal fluid. He could not force home the connector attaching the computer brain to the neural cable.

“Hold on a minute.” Birdie Kelly wiped his hands down his pants, then reached across to take both the brain and the connector from Graves. He pressed the plug home hard onto the multiple prongs of the computer’s receptor.

“Gently!” Graves said. But the body of E. C. Tally was already sitting up and lifting free of J’merlia’s grip.

“Hmm — kkh — khmmm.” The torso shivered, and the eyes snapped open.

Graves bent close. “E. C. Tally! Can you hear me?”

“Very well.” The topless head turned. “Excuse me, Councilor, but there is no need to shout like that. This body is equipped with excellent sensory apparatus.”

The skull was still gaping wide, the empty cranium inverted and hanging upside down in front of Tally’s bright blue eyes. Birdie Kelly stared at that empty skull, split open like a coconut, and at the neural cable that ran from the base of the brain to the little sphere in his right hand. His torso wanted to shiver, too. Life on Opal was tough, but it had not prepared him for this sort of thing.

As Birdie watched, Tally reached up, took the open skull case in both hands, and casually rotated it back into position. “It won’t quite close, I’m afraid,” he said, “because the neural connector inhibits the seal. If possible we should tie it in place. It would be inconvenient to have the upper cranium detached and lost.”

He turned to glance at the sphere that Birdie was holding. “Handle me with care if you please, Commissioner Kelly. What you have in your hands represents a substantial investment of Fourth Alliance property. I’m afraid that the body has already suffered minor damage, since it was not anticipated that we would need to perform brain removal in an unprepared facility.” A thin trickle of blood was running down the left side of Tally’s forehead. He wiped it away casually, stared around the chamber, and continued. “Also, my motor and sensory performance is somewhat impaired. The signal-carrying capacity of the neural cable is less than that of the original connection. I am able to see with rather less definition, colors are muted, and I sense that my muscular control is diminished. However, it should certainly be adequate for our purposes.”

He rose to his feet, staggering a little before he caught his balance. At his direction J’merlia and Graves tied a makeshift bandage around his head, adding an extra wrapping to hold both the upper cranium and the external neural cable in position. Birdie Kelly was still holding the brain in nervous hands, doing his best to avoid jiggling it or putting any pressure on it.

“Are you sure you are ready?” Graves asked. “Don’t you want to practice moving?”

But Tally was already stepping forward. “That would be pointless,” he said. “My coordination would not improve. But as one precaution, let me do this.” He picked up the strong line that he had used on his previous foray toward the center of the room and tied it around his waist. “You can always haul me back here. So now, if J’merlia will pay out the neural cable, Commissioner Kelly, as necessary…”

Tally took two staggering steps forward and began to weave his way down the gentle slope that led to the center of the chamber. He was soon into the first of the concentric rings. At the far edge of the yellow annulus he paused for a moment, while the others froze. Then he was off again, heading for the silent figure of Kallik. Birdie Kelly watched him, afraid even to blink, as J’merlia paid out cable from the reel that he was holding, at a pace just enough to prevent the line from tightening or drooping to touch the floor. There was something wholly unnatural about that human form, head bloody and bandaged, moving into the shallow and brightly lit cauldron of gaudy colors. He staggered as he walked, and the two cables trailing behind him swayed and jerked with a life and rhythm of their own.

“Come out at once if you feel you are losing memories,” Graves called.

Tally waved an arm without slowing his progress. “Certainly. Though I do not expect that to happen. How can it, when I am with you in the hands of Commissioner Kelly?”

He was already past the green ring and moving on to the purple one. Two seconds more, and he was sinking slowly to sit on the floor beside Kallik, careful to keep his head upright. His fingers touched the Hymenopt’s furry thorax. “She is alive. Unconscious, but not apparently injured. I cannot lift the line around her from the floor, but if I release her from it I see no difficulty in carrying her out.”

Tally stood up and peered toward the center of the chamber. “But first, I think it is better if I proceed all the way in, and examine the situation there. I can retrieve Kallik as I return.”

Not what I’d do, Birdie thought. A bird in the hand… He glanced at the sphere of the now-disembodied computer. It was strange that the only way to pass messages to the real E. C. Tally was to call them to the brainless body moving slowly toward the middle of the room, and have the sensory input fed back through the cable to the brain that Birdie was holding.

Tally was moving more slowly. The low central platform was only fifteen meters away, but he took twenty cautious seconds to reach it. Two steps from the silent figure of Louis Nenda he paused.

“There is something peculiar about the dais itself. As I have approached it, an interior structure has gradually become visible. It is a set of dodecahedra, invisible from fifteen meters. At ten I saw a hazy outline, like gray smoke. Now the pattern is apparently solid. Tendrils run from two of the dodecahedral faces and surround the heads of Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial. That must be why the bodies can remain seated upright, although both are unconscious.”

Birdie glanced at Graves, then peered toward the platform. From where he stood it looked empty except for the outward-facing seats, the Cecropian, and the human.

“I propose to try to remove Nenda from the platform first,” Tally said. “I have no idea if there will be resistance, active or passive.”

He took the final two steps, reached up, and grasped Louis Nenda by the shoulders. He began to lift. To the watchers it appeared that the two bodies moved to an unstable position, leaning back far from the vertical.

“There is definite resistance,” Tally said. “But also there is progress. We are a few centimeters farther from the platform, and the connecting tendril has thinned. It is starting to turn in on itself, like a ring of blown smoke—” He lurched backward suddenly, and fell to the floor with Nenda on top of him. ” — and now the tendril has gone completely. Be ready to reel in the line and the neural cable. We are coming out.”

With Nenda’s body set over his right shoulder in a fireman’s lift, Tally began to walk slowly back from the center of the chamber. Another minute, and he was by the side of Julius Graves. Together they lowered Louis Nenda to the floor.

Birdie Kelly stared at the pitted and noduled chest, gray and disfigured. “Look at that. What did they do to him?”

Graves bent low, studying the roughened skin. “Nothing was done here, according to Steven. This is a Zardalu augment, designed to permit a human to speak to a Cecropian via pheromonal transfer. We thought this was a lost technology, and a banned one. There must be places in the Communion where the old slave races had mastered and retained parts of the Zardalu sciences.”

Tally had already turned and was heading back toward the middle of the vaulted chamber. Cable was pulling through J’merlia’s too-tight grip. He began to pay it out again just as Louis Nenda grunted and his lips twitched.

“Where the hell am I?” The eyes opened and glared around. The squat figure began trying to sit up.

“That’s a good sign,” Graves said. “He can speak, so at least he hasn’t been wiped totally clean.” He turned to Nenda. “You’re inside a planetoid near Gargantua. Do you remember coming here?”

Nenda shook his dark head and struggled to his feet. “Not a glimmer.” His speech was labored and swollen-tongued.

“So what’s the last thing you do remember?”

Nenda ignored the question. He was too busy staring at the others. “How about that. Fancy you showing up. Julius Graves. And Birdie Kelly. And J’merlia. And all alive.”

“All alive, and no thanks to you.” Graves leaned close. “Come on, Nenda, this is important. What’s the last thing you recall, before you went unconscious?”

Nenda rubbed his hand over his unshaven jaw. “Last thing I remember?” He gave Graves a cautious look. “Mmm. Last thing I remember, Atvar H’sial an’ me were lifting off Quake in the Have-It-All. Summertide was nearly there. I guess it came, and I guess it went.”

“You don’t remember firing on another ship?”

“Firing? Me?” Nenda cleared his throat. “No way. I didn’t fire on anything.”

“Remember it or not, you’ll have to answer for that when we get back to Opal. You’ve already been formally charged with lethal assault.”

“Won’t be the first time someone’s accused an innocent man.” Nenda was recovering fast, the black eyes blinking furiously. “What happened to At? She was with me on the ship.”

“Atvar H’sial?” Graves turned toward the middle of the great chamber. He nodded. “In there. Good. I see they’re on the way out now.”

J’merlia was squeaking with excitement. While Graves and Nenda were talking, E. C. Tally had returned to the dais, pulled Atvar H’sial clear, and was staggering back toward them. He was doubled over with the weight of the great Cecropian body. Nenda followed Graves’s gesture, taking in the bandaged, tottering form, the cable leading from its head to where they stood, the recumbent figure of Kallik four paces behind, and the backdrop of the great, vaulted chamber.

“Hey, what’s going on here? What’d you do to At?”

“We did nothing, and we’re not sure what’s going on. All we know is that you and Atvar H’sial were unconscious in the middle of the chamber, and we have been trying to rescue you.”

“And Kallik? What did you do to my Hymenopt?”

“She became unconscious, trying to get you out.”

J’merlia was jumping up and down with excitement as Tally emerged from the outermost ring. As the Lo’tfian helped to lower Atvar H’sial to the floor, Tally staggered a couple of paces farther and sat down suddenly. The blue eyes closed, and his hands went up to touch his bandaged head.

“This body is regrettably close to its physical limit.” He spoke in a whisper. “I must rest for a few moments. However, we can be pleased with our progress. I am confident that the difficult part is all over. Kallik weighs little. I will take a brief pause to recuperate, and then I will carry her out of the chamber. She is ready to be moved.”

“Hell, I can get her.” Nenda was pushing forward. “You sit down, take it easy. She’s mine, and she’s my responsibility.”

“No.” Graves caught his arm. “Go in there and you’ll be in the same condition as she is in — as you were in. The chamber contains a Lotus field. That is why it was necessary to disembody E. C. Tally before he entered.” He pointed at the rough-surfaced sphere that Kelly was handing to J’merlia. “His brain remained here.”

Nenda took another and more thoughtful look at the crouched body and the cable running from its bandaged head. “Good enough,” he said after a few moments. “I’d better look after At, though — she’ll be coming round in a minute, from the look of her, and she might get violent. Don’t worry, I know how to handle her.”

The Cecropian’s black wing cases had opened to reveal four delicate vestigial wings marked by red and white elongated eyespots. The end of the proboscis was moving out from its home in the pleated chin, and the yellow trumpetlike horns on the head were lifting.

At the same time, the brain-empty body of E. C. Tally was struggling to its feet. His eyes opened slowly. “I must go now and recover Kallik.”

“It’s too soon.” Graves moved to Tally’s side.

“No. It must be soon. The interface is beginning to be affected by seepage of cerebrospinal fluid. The performance of the neural connect is diminishing, and I am receiving worsening sensory inputs. I will go to Kallik while I am still able to see her. Otherwise, we must begin all over again.”

Tally did not wait for approval. The body gave a stuttering step forward, then leaned to one side. It began a crablike shuffle down the slope, heading for the unconscious Hymenopt. Tally’s body had taken ten steps and had almost reached Kallik when Atvar H’sial gave a shrill, earsplitting scream, rose fully upright, and leapt toward Julius Graves.

In the next second Birdie Kelly saw everything and could do nothing.

The Cecropian ran into Graves first and sent him sprawling. Then the councilor and the Cecropian together collided with Birdie. One of her legs knocked him flying and sent the reel of cable spinning away to the periphery of the room. At the same time the brain of E. C. Tally, too securely held by the Lo’tfian, jerked free of the cable and rolled away with J’merlia inside the yellow ring and toward the chamber’s center. As the neural connect was broken, Tally’s body, moving toward Kallik, crumpled and fell to the floor. Another of Atvar H’sial’s legs came sweeping across Birdie and knocked him flat on his back.

He lay staring up at the ceiling. He could not move. All that he could see was a part of the chamber’s domed ceiling, Julius Graves’s equally domed bald head, and part of one of Atvar H’sial’s wing cases. A big weight was sitting on his chest. He was half-stunned from the bruising impact of the back of his head on the floor, his nose was bleeding, and half his teeth felt as though they had been jarred loose.

If E. C. Tally had not assured them that the difficult part was all over, Birdie would never have guessed it.