Divergence

CHAPTER 3

The Summer Dreamboat had started life as a plaything, a teenager’s runabout intended for within-system planetary hops. Everything aboard the ship had been designed with that in mind, from the compact galley, sanitation, and disposal facilities, to the single pair of narrow berths. The addition of a full-fledged Bose Drive had provided the Dreamboat with a far-ranging interstellar capability, while whittling the internal space down even further.

Its occupants — or at least the human ones — were cursing that addition now as wasted space. The passage from Dobelle to Gargantua had to be done using the cold-catalyzed fusion drive, which could make no use at all of the Bose interstellar network.

During the second day of the journey Darya Lang and Hans Rebka had retreated to the berths, where they lay side by side.

“Too many legs,” Rebka said softly.

Darya Lang nodded. She did not say it, but they both knew the cramped quarters were harder on her. He had grown up on Teufel, one of the poorest and most backward worlds of the Phemus Circle. Hardship and discomfort were to him so natural and so familiar that he did not even recognize their presence. She had been spoiled — though she had never known it, until the past couple of months — by the luxury and abundance of Sentinel Gate, one of the spiral arm’s garden planets.

“For me, too many legs,” she repeated. “Sixteen too many. And too many eyes for you.”

He understood at once and touched her arm apologetically. The Lo’tfian, J’merlia, seemed mostly legs and eyes. Eight black articulated limbs were attached to the long, pipestem torso, and J’merlia’s narrow head was dominated by the big, lemon-colored compound eyes on short eyestalks. Kallik was just as well-endowed. The Hymenopt’s body was short, stubby, and black-furred, but eight wiry legs sprang from the rotund torso, and the small, smooth head was entirely surrounded by multiple pairs of bright, black eyes. Kallik and J’merlia did not mean to get in the way, but when they were both awake and active it was impossible to move around the ship’s little cabin without tripping over the odd outstretched appendage.

Darya Lang and Hans Rebka had retreated to the berths as the only place left. But even there they found little privacy — or too little, Darya thought, for Hans Rebka.

The two months since she had left her quiet life as a research scientist on Sentinel Gate had been full of surprises; not least of them was the discovery that many “facts” about life on the backward and impoverished worlds of the Perimeter were just not so. Everyone on Shasta knew that the urge to reproduce dominated everything on the underpopulated planets of the Phemus Circle, where both men and women were obsessed with sex. The rich worlds of the Fourth Alliance “knew” that people on Teufel and Scaldworld and Quake and Opal did it whenever and wherever they could.

Perhaps so, in principle; there was a curious primness in border planet society when it came to practice. Men and women might show immediate interest in each other, from bold eye contact to open invitation. But let the time arrive for doing something, in public or even in private, and Darya suspected they were oddly puritanical.

She had obtained positive and annoying proof of that idea when the Summer Dreamboat embarked on the long journey to Gargantua. On the first night the two aliens had stretched out on the floor, leaving the berths to Darya and Hans. She lay in her bunk and waited. When nothing happened, she took the initiative.

He rebuffed her, though in an oddly indirect way. “Of course I’d like to — but what about your foot?” he whispered. “You’ll hurt it too much. I mean — we can’t. Your foot…”

Darya’s foot had been burned during the retreat from Quake at Summertide. It was healing fast. She resisted the urge to say, “Damn my foot. Why don’t you just let me be the judge of what hurts too much?”

Instead she withdrew, convinced that Hans came from one of those curious societies where women were not supposed to take the lead in sexual matters. She waited. And waited. Finally, during the next sleep period, she asked what was wrong. Wasn’t he interested? Didn’t he find her attractive?

“Of course I do.” He kept his voice low and glanced across toward the two aliens. As far as Darya could tell they were both sound asleep, in an untidy sprawl of intermeshed limbs. “But what about them?”

“What about ’em? I hope you’re not suggesting they should join in.”

“Don’t be disgusting. But if they wake up, they’ll see us.”

So that was it. A privacy taboo, just like the one on Moldave. And apparently a strong one. Hans would not be able to do anything as long as they were cooped up in the ship with J’merlia and Kallik, even though the aliens could have nothing beyond a possible academic interest in human mating procedures.

But their indifference did not change the situation for Hans Rebka. Darya had given up.

“Too many eyes for you,” she repeated. “I know. Don’t worry about it, Hans. So how much longer before we reach Gargantua?”

“About forty hours.” He was relieved to change the subject. “I can’t stop wondering — what do you think we are going to find there?”

He looked at Darya expectantly. She had no answer, though she admitted the justice of his question. After all, she was the one who had actually seen the dark sphere gobble up Louis Nenda’s ship and head off to Gargantua. Hans had been too busy trying to stop Nenda from shooting them out of the sky. But did she really expect to find the Builders there, now that she’d had plenty of time to think about it?

For Darya, that was the ultimate question. The Builders had disappeared from the spiral arm more than five million years earlier, but she had been pursuing them in one way or another for all of her adult life. It had begun with a single Builder artifact, the Sentinel, visible from her birthworld of Sentinel Gate. Darya had first seen it as an infant. She had grown up with that shining and striated sphere glowing in her night sky. Inaccessible to humans and to all human constructs, the unreachable interior of Sentinel had come to symbolize for her the whole mystery of the lost Builders. Her conviction that Summertide was somehow connected with Builder artifacts had brought her to Dobelle, and the events at Summertide had provided a new insight: the alignment of planetary and stellar positions that caused Summertide was itself an artifact, the whole stellar system a construct of the long-vanished master engineers.

But Hans Rebka’s question still demanded an answer. Had she become so obsessed with the Builders, and everything to do with them, that she saw Builder influence everywhere? It was not uncommon for a scientist to live with a theory for so long that it took control. Data and observations were forced to fit the theory, rather than being used to test it and if necessary reject it. How did she know she was not guilty of that same failing?

“I know what I saw, Hans. But beyond the evidence of my eyes — however you weight that — all I can offer are my own deductions, however you weight them. Can you pick up an image of Gargantua with the external sensors?”

“Should be able to.” He craned his head around. “And we ought to be able to look at it right here — we’re line-of-sight for the projectors. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a minute.”

It did not take that long. Twenty seconds at the display controls of the Summer Dreamboat gave Hans Rebka a three-dimensional image in the space above the twin berths. He carried the remote control unit over to Darya, letting her use it to pinpoint the target and zoom as she chose.

The planet sat in the center of the globe of view. And what a change since the last time that Darya had seen it. Then the light of Gargantua had been screened by the protective filters of the Dreamboat’s viewing port. The planet had been gigantic, sure enough, bulking across half the field of view, but it had also been faint, faded to a spectral shade by the brilliant torrents of light sleeting in from Mandel and Amaranth. Now Gargantua was a sphere not much bigger than Darya’s thumbnail, but it glowed like a jewel, rich oranges and ochers of high-quality zircon and hessonite against a black background scattered with faint stars. There was just a hint of banding to mark the axis of the planet’s rotation, and the four bright points of light in suspiciously accurate alignment with the equator had to be Gargantua’s major satellites. Darya knew that a thousand other sizable fragments of debris orbited closer to the planet, but from this distance they were invisible. Their paths must have become a monstrous jumble after the perturbations of periastron passage close to Mandel and Amaranth.

Not the harmony of the spheres, but a rough charivari of tangled orbits. Navigation through them would be a problem.

She studied the image, then used the remote marker to indicate a point a quarter of a radius away from the planetary terminator.

“When the ray of light first appeared, it came from just about there.” She closed her eyes for a moment, recalling what she had seen. “But it wasn’t ordinary light, or it would have been invisible in empty space. I could see it all the way, and I could follow its line right back to that point.”

“But couldn’t it have come from a lot farther away — way out past Gargantua?”

“No. Because by the time the silver sphere turned into a hole in space, swallowed up Louis Nenda’s ship, and zoomed off along the light-line, the ray’s point of origin had moved. It was right next to Gargantua by the time I lost sight of it. The only way you can explain that is if it came from something in orbit around Gargantua.”

Darya closed her eyes again. She had a bit of a headache, and recalling the last desperate minutes close to Summertide had somehow made her dizzy and disoriented. Her eyes did not want to focus. She must have been staring for too long at the image on the display. She squinted up at Gargantua. The giant planet was receding fast from Mandel, on a complex orbit controlled both by Mandel and its dwarf stellar companion. But the Dreamboat was moving faster yet. It was catching up.

“A few more hours, Hans.” She suddenly felt slow and lazy. “Just a few more hours. We’ll start to see all the little satellites. Begin to have an idea where we’re going. Won’t we?” She was puzzled by her own words, and by the odd sound of her own voice. “Where are we going? I don’t know where we’re going.”

He did not answer. She made a big effort and turned to him, to find that he was not looking at her at all. He was staring at J’merlia and Kallik.

“Still asleep,” he said.

“Yeah. Still asleep.” Darya smiled. “ ’S all right, Hans, I’m not going to attack you.”

But he was sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bunk. His face was redder than usual, and the line of the scar that ran from his left temple to the point of his jaw showed clearly.

“Something’s wrong. Kallik never sleeps for more than half an hour at a time. Stay there.”

She watched as he hurried over to the central control panel of the Dreamboat, studied it, and swore aloud. He reached forward. There was a whir of atmospheric conditioners, and Darya felt a cold and sudden draft in her face. She muttered a protest. He ignored her. He was bending over the inert forms of J’merlia and Kallik; then, suddenly, he appeared at her side again.

“How are you feeling? Come on, sit up,”

Darya found herself being levered to an upright sitting position. The chilly air brought her to fuller wakefulness, and she shivered. “I’m all right. What’s wrong?”

“Atmosphere. The ship took a real beating when we lifted off from Quake. Something was knocked out of whack in the air plant. I’ve put in a temporary override, and we’ll do manual control till we know what happened.”

For the first time, his urgency reached through to her.

“Are we all right? And Kallik and J’merlia?”

“Now we are, all of us. We’re quite safe. But we weren’t. Maybe J’merlia and Kallik could have breathed what we were getting a few minutes ago — they have a high tolerance for bad air — but you and I couldn’t. Too much monoxide. Another half hour like that, we’d have been dead.”

Dead! Darya felt a cold wave across her body, nothing to do with the chilly cabin breeze. When they had faced death at Summertide, the dangers had been obvious to all of them. But Death could arrive in other ways, never making an appointment or announcing his presence, creeping in to take a person when she was least expecting him…

She could not relax. Hans Rebka had stretched out on the bunk again by Darya’s side. She moved close to him, needing human contact. He was breathing hard, and a moment later they were touching along most of their bodies. She could feel him trembling. But then she realized that the tremors were in his hands, touching her face and reaching beneath her shirt to her breasts. In the next few seconds it became obvious that he was highly excited.

They clung to each other without speaking. Finally Darya craned her head up, to stare past Hans at the sleeping forms of J’merlia and Kallik.

What about them — suppose they wake up? She was on the point of saying it. She caught herself. Shut up, dummy. What are you trying to do?

She made one concession to modesty, reaching up past him to turn the light off above the bunks. He did not seem to care; after a few more seconds, neither did Darya. Neither, she was sure, did J’merlia and Kallik.

An hour later the two aliens were still asleep. So was Hans. Darya lay with her eyes closed, reflecting that one aspect of male human behavior varied little from Fourth Alliance to Phemus Circle.

And I’m beginning to understand him better, she thought. He’s a sweet man, but he’s a strange one. A close call from death doesn’t frighten him. It makes him excited — excited enough to ignore his own taboos. I don’t think he gave Kallik and J’merlia one thought… nor did I, for that matter. I suppose it’s not the approach of death that’s the stimulus, it’s the knowledge that you survived… Maybe that’s the way with all the men of the Perimeter worlds, and the women, too. It certainly worked well for Hans.

She smiled to herself. Pity it didn’t work for me. Death doesn’t excite me, it scares me. I enjoyed myself, but I didn’t even come close. Never mind. There’ll be other chances.

At last she opened her eyes. They had not bothered to turn off the projection unit. Gargantua hung above her head, perceptibly bigger. She could see the markings on the swollen face, and the planet had turned a quarter of a revolution since the last time she had looked at it. The huge and permanent atmospheric vortex known as the Eye of Gargantua sat in the center of the disk. It was staring straight at her: orange-red, hypnotic, baleful.

Darya found herself unable to breathe.

So there’ll be other chances, will there? the Eye’s expression said. Don’t count on it. I know something about death, too.