Resurgence

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Marglottas?

Guardian of Travel had promised a transit to another world, but that long-abandoned being had offered no guarantees as to how much time the passage might take, or how it would feel.

Darya was drowning. Her eyes, mouth, nose, and lungs were filled with thick viscous mud. The suffocation had gone on forever, long past the point where she must be dead.

She tried to breathe, tried to cough, tried to scream—and could do none of them. After several lifetimes of misery, a new discomfort was added. Her body was now being extruded, forced through a tube far too narrow to admit it. She was changing shape, transformed by remorseless pressure to a long, pale worm. The agony of breathlessness was nothing compared to this.

And then, without warning, the pain ended. Darya felt a final moment of compression and rapid release, as though her body was being expelled like a cork from a bottle. Suddenly she was curled into a fetal position and lying on something soft. Her lungs and eyes were clear. She could breathe and see.

She sat up, but had to wait until a wave of nausea passed. She looked down at her suit, convinced that it must be coated with thick mud. But the outside was spotless, cleaner than ever before, as though the transit had removed every trace of dust and grime.

As she stood up, still unsteady on her feet, the ground a couple of meters from her began to boil and seethe. She backed away. A dark bubble was pushing its way out of the quaking earth. It grew steadily until it reared to twice Darya’s height, then suddenly burst and vanished. Left behind where the bubble had emerged from the ground lay two still forms.

As Darya stepped cautiously toward them, one sat up. It said, “Stone me. I wouldn’t call that first-class travel. But I guess we weren’t promised anything more than a transit. Ben? Are you all right?”

It was Hans Rebka, shuffling on hands and knees across to the other suited figure.

Ben Blesh said, like someone in a dream, “I don’t seem to be dead. That’s a surprise. But I can’t sit up, and I can’t move my arms.”

“Let me take a look.” Hans turned to Darya, as casual as if this sort of thing happened every day. “Give me a hand, would you?”

Darya moved behind Ben as Hans lifted him, and held him in a sitting position. “Where are we, Hans?”

“Lord knows. I wonder if we’re even in the same universe as we were. First things first, though. According to my suit’s sensors, wherever we are, it has breathable air. That’s good. We can remove our suits.”

“Wouldn’t it be safer to keep them on?”

“For you and me, it might. But Ben’s has to come off.”

“Why me?” Ben was trying, and failing, to sit up without assistance. “I thought my suit was feeding me painkillers.”

“It was. It is. That’s part of the problem. The pain that we felt during the transit was all psychological, but your suit didn’t know that. It decided you were being injured worse and worse every minute, so it upped the dosage of analgesics to blot out your discomfort. That’s why you can’t move. You’ve been overdosed. Sit still. I have to get you out of there and reset the levels.”

As Hans eased Ben out of his suit, Darya knew that she could do little to help. Hans was an expert troubleshooter. She was at best an expert trouble-finder. He had opened their visors. She did the same and took her first breath of alien air. It was hot, humid, and musky.

She stared about her. Guardian of Travel, by accident or design, had dumped them out halfway down a long, smooth incline. At the bottom, a couple of kilometers away, she thought she saw the glint of water. On the other side of the river, if that’s what it was, the ground rose away to another hillside. More significant, perhaps, was another feature. Running alongside and beyond the water, straight and flat, a smooth gray ribbon suggested a stone or gravel road.

Darya swiveled her open faceplate to a position where she could read its built-in sensors. No radio signals registered on any frequency. The instruments showed eighty-five percent of a standard gravity and a slightly richer fraction of oxygen. Those accounted for the light and slightly light-headed feeling. Above her head, a greenish-yellow light filtered through continuous cloud cover. It was much stronger far off to one side. Either they had arrived not long after dawn, or soon it would be night.

She said to Hans, “Anything I can do to help?” And, when he shook his head, “Then I think I’ll walk a little way down the hill. Seems like there might be a road at the bottom. It would be nice to meet something we can learn to talk to, and find out where we are.”

“Don’t hold your breath. Not the best way of putting it, considering what we’ve just been through. But do you notice something odd about this place?”

“Hans, everything is odd.”

“All right, then, something here is odder than any place has a right to be. You’ve visited a bunch of different planets. Did you ever hear of one with plant life, and no animals?”

“Never.”

“Look around you. Not a beetle, not a bird, not a bat, not a butterfly. No little critters wriggling through the undergrowth, to escape or take a closer look at us. Where are they?”

“Maybe we’re in the wrong location for animals.”

“Could be. But this sure feels like it ought to be the right location. Warmth, water, soil, plenty of light, lots of plants—what more could an animal ask?” Hans bent again over Ben, who was now unconscious. “Damn these over-eager suits. They’re marvels compared with anything I ever saw before, but they do too good a job making sure the person inside doesn’t feel uncomfortable. I’ve got to get him out or he may never wake up. You go ahead. Take a look around. Maybe you can figure out where the animals went.”

Until Hans started talking about animals, Darya had been feeling quite good about things. Against all odds the three of them had escaped from the deadly surface and desolate center of Iceworld. They were on a planet comfortably able to support life, and the road by the river was evidence that it also supported intelligence.

Hans must be wrong. A planet didn’t need to have animals on the surface. A thriving biosphere could be maintained very well by creatures that lived below ground, feeding on the roots of plants that grew in the warmth and light above.

She was walking over a layer of sturdy greenery that crackled slightly with each step. Every forty or fifty meters a dense clump of a different growth sprang up much taller, some reaching as high as Darya’s head. She changed her path toward the water so that she could approach one of them. She closed her faceplate as she came closer. It was unlikely that she would run into anything dangerous, but there was no point in taking risks, Anything that could chew a way in through the ultra-tough material of her suit, with its instant sealing compounds and multi-layered structure, would more than earn a meal.

The growths had the shape of irregular cones with truncated tops. A green layer of overlapping scales, each about as big as Darya’s hand, formed the outer layer. She pushed one out of the way to examine the interior. It was too dark to make out details until she used the headlight on her suit. She peered in, flinched, and took a step backward. The green scale fell into its original position to cover the opening.

Darya stood frozen for a second or two, then realized that she must take another look. Maybe Hans’s words had made her imagine things that weren’t there. This time she moved the green scale aside and held the light steady. The cone-growth had a yellow axis running up its middle. Five multi-legged objects hung suspended there. Darya thought at first that they were living creatures, and she hesitated to touch one; but they did not move. Finally she found the nerve to reach out her gloved hand and pluck one away from the plant’s central bole.

It was dark brown and about the length of her forearm. And it was dead. Not just dead but mummified, so it appeared almost as it must have been in life. She turned it. Two big compound eyes sat on either side of a fanged maw. They seemed to stare accusingly at Darya.

So Hans was wrong. There were animals. She did not find comfort in that fact. She slipped the little creature into an outside pocket of her suit and continued downhill toward the stream.

The water was clear and swift-flowing over a bed of gravel and fist-sized rocks. Darya looked closely, but saw nothing living. The water moved, and that was all. She waded carefully across and kept stepping forward until she came to the gray strip.

It was a road, no doubt about that, and it had been kept in good condition. A pile of stone by the roadside about two hundred meters away was an obvious source of materials for regular maintenance.

Where did the road lead?

Darya stared to her left, then to her right. She saw no sign of buildings, but maybe a kilometer away some dark object stood on the road itself.

She turned on her suit radio. “Hans?”

“I hear you.”

“There are animals. I found them. Or at least, I found some dead ones. Now I’m across the stream and standing on a road. No buildings, but I see something else sitting on the road itself. It’s within walking distance. I thought I might take a look at it.”

“Might as well. There’s nothing for you to do back here. I fixed up Ben as best I can, but he’s still asleep. One thing, though. We don’t know how long the day is here, but it’s my impression that the sun is lower in the sky. Don’t stay away too long.”

Darya stared off to her left. The sun seemed to her to be in about the same position, though it was certainly darker. Rain clouds, maybe? If nothing else, the stream guaranteed a supply of drinking water.

She opened her faceplate. Even if the sun was going down, the air felt as hot as ever. She headed off in the opposite direction, away from the sun. Progress was much faster now that she was on a solid level surface. The dark object on the road grew steadily, transforming from a shapeless blob to a definite oval outline. It was a huge humpbacked body, supported on six thick limbs.

Could that be another dead animal, somehow frozen and mummified in the very act of walking?

As Darya came closer yet, she revised her idea of what she was seeing. Legs, yes, each one solid and thick, but this was no animal. It was a walking vehicle. The great “head” facing Darya contained a transparent window where you might expect eyes to be, allowing her to look through to the interior. Two shapes, pale-yellow and motionless, sat within. The still forms had a disturbing familiarity.

Darya kept walking. The whole front of the vehicle formed a single door. She located the handle, reached out, and swung it open.

A gust of warm air touched her face. It carried the smell of something old and rancid, but that was not what made her shiver. She recognized the creatures sitting lifeless on the two broad seats. She had seen them, or their relatives before—although never in life.

She slammed the door closed.

“Hans?” She could hear the tremble in her voice. “Hans?”

“Darya? Are you all right?”

“I’m not right at all. Hans, you won’t believe this, but we’re on Marglot. I’ve just seen some of the Marglotta. They are here in front of me. They are dead. I think they are all dead. We arrived here too late.”

Darya wanted Hans Rebka to see the walking vehicle and confirm her suspicions as to what she was seeing inside it. But there were two problems. Hans should not leave Ben Blesh alone until it was safe to do so; and Darya doubted her ability to navigate the six-legged walking vehicle off the road and up the hillside—even assuming that she overcame her squeamishness at pushing the mummified body out of the driver’s seat.

While she tried to decided what to do next, another factor entered. It started to rain. Great spherical drops as big as marbles drifted down from the warm and clouded sky. When one of them burst on the nose of Darya’s upturned face, she slammed shut her suit’s visor, jerked open the door of the car, and scrambled inside closing it behind her.

Her inspection of the Marglotta, made without touching the bodies, was suggestive but not conclusive. They seemed to have died instantly, and without any warning. The clawed paws of one of them rested on pedals and control bars. The other sat with a rounded dark-brown ball—food, perhaps?—raised halfway to its open mouth.

She said into her radio, “Hans, I don’t know what happened here. But whatever it was, it was quick. If it’s like this all over the planet, the Marglotta died fast and without any idea what was coming.”

“There’s no danger now, is there?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“I’m wondering where we are going to spend the night. The sun is lower, I’m sure of it, and the rain is coming down harder. It would be a major effort, but if I could carry Ben down there we could spend the night in comfort, inside the car and out of the rain.”

Darya decided she had to put her feelings about the dead Marglotta behind her. Even if Hans could carry Ben, what would that do to the other man’s injured body?

“Let me try something, Hans. Maybe I can work the car’s controls and get it walking.”

The hardest act was the first one. She had to lift one body out of the driver’s seat and place it in the rear of the car. The Marglotta were small, no more than a meter or so in height, so weight was no problem. But as she raised the driver’s body, the arms reaching for the controls snapped off. They were as brittle as long-dried twigs. Darya gritted her teeth, hoisted the body over the seat back, and laid it on the flat area behind. She squeezed into the driver’s place, trying to ignore the shrivelled corpse by her side.

The controls were simple enough, assuming that Marglotta thought processes in any way resembled those of humans. The condition of the vehicle’s power source was another matter. She had no idea how long it might have been sitting on the stony road unused, or even what the source of power might be. The technology level of the road and the vehicle suggested fossil fuel or a stored energy flywheel, rather than solar power, a fusion plant, or superconducting rings.

Had the vehicle been smart enough to switch itself off after it sat for a while without moving? Darya searched for a general power switch and located two candidates. The first operated the six articulated legs, lengthening them until Darya sat uncomfortably high above the road. She reversed that, restoring the car body to its original height. The second switch led to a hum and bone-rattling vibrations. It did not trouble Darya, but flakes of dried skin shook loose from the creature by her side and rustled down to coat the floor of the car.

Darya did not relish the prospect of driving while dead bodies disintegrated around her, but Hans Rebka had to see these things—or what was left of them by the time she got there.

Her hands and feet were on the same pedals and levers that the Marglotta had used. She experimented with them cautiously. They seemed simple enough. One for speed control, two of them for turning right or left, and one for reversing direction. She “walked” the car along the stony road, getting a feel for pace and movement. The rolling up-and-down gait of the vehicle was not unpleasant. Once you were used to it, the feeling was even soothing. Maximum speed was hardly more than a walk, though Darya knew she was ignorant of such things as gears and faster drive modes.

She continued along the stony road until she was level with the suited figures of Hans Rebka and Ben Blesh, then made a right-angle turn toward the hill.

Now came the tricky part. She had to guide the car across the fast-flowing stream, then negotiate the slope ahead of her.

It proved easier than expected. The car contained some kind of stabilizing device, which automatically shortened or lengthened the front and back legs so as to keep the inside always level.

The limited speed of the vehicle made her progress irritatingly slow, but within ten minutes Darya brought the car to a halt ten meters from where Hans and Ben were sitting. The faceplates of their suits were closed to keep out the rain, now pouring down torrentially.

They walked toward her. She was pleased to see that Ben was awake and moving almost normally, though he was holding his right arm close in to favor his broken ribs.

She opened the car’s wide front door and the two men scrambled in. Hans Rebka apparently experienced none of Darya’s reverence for the dead. He examined the Marglotta sitting in the passenger seat for a few seconds, and nodded. “You’re right. Just the way I remember the dead ones, back at Upside Miranda Port. Died the same way, I’d guess, though I don’t know how that could be. Well, there’s nothing we can do for them now.”

He unceremoniously lifted the second body and dumped it over the seat into the back of the car.

“This is a lot better than spending the night outside. Darya, you keep the driver’s seat. Ben, the passenger seat is yours. I’ll make a place for myself in the back.”

“In with the bodies?”

He gave her a puzzled look. “That’s what I had in mind. Unless you think I ought to dump them outside? I wasn’t going to, because if we decide tomorrow that we’d like to dissect them, by that time the rain could have ruined the bodies completely. They’re falling to bits as it is.”

He sounded unbelievably cold and casual. Darya had to remind herself that there was another side to the man. In crises, he seemed able to suppress every trace of emotion. All was calm logic. Maybe that’s why he was such a good troubleshooter.

If you wanted empathy and feeling for others, you would take Julian Graves. If encyclopedic knowledge was the requirement, without much judgment to go with it, then E.C. Tally was the person of choice. If you needed someone who through long experience had a sense of Builder constructs and how they might and might not act, maybe you would turn to Darya herself. But if you were in such deep trouble that you thought you would never emerge alive, then you turned to Hans Rebka—and you hoped that sentiment and finer feelings would not interfere with the need for the split-second decisions and hard actions that survival demanded.

Ben was already in the passenger seat, his body turned a little to give him as much comfort as he could find. He needed real medical treatment, but he would not get it here. Hans was in the back. He was moving things around there, and Darya did not choose to turn her head and find out what they were.

She stared straight ahead, out through the car’s forward window. The sun was lower yet, dipping toward the horizon with what seemed like infinite slowness. The day on Marglot was very long, and they had to be prepared to endure an equally long night.

The rain fell steadily, soaking into the springy vegetation and the tall conical growths that hid the small mummified animals. The hillside was as bleak a prospect as Darya had ever seen. Tonight they would rest as best they could, but tomorrow they must begin to ask and answer a different question: Was it possible for humans to survive on Marglot, as the food supplies of their suits ran out?

Darya’s brain felt turned off. She was not thinking about anything at all as she stared at the hillside ahead. She saw nothing and was expecting to see nothing, when her trance was broken by a change in the light outside. A vertical shaft of illumination was forming, as though a second sun shone through a rift in the clouds to produce a bright column of light. The shaft was about four meters across, and it struck the ground where Darya, Hans, and Ben had been expelled from it.

“Hans!”

“What?” Incredibly, his voice sounded as though she had wakened him from sleep.

“Look outside. In front of the car. Something’s happening.”

“Huh?” But he was sitting up, leaning over Darya’s shoulder. “That wasn’t there ten minutes ago.”

“No. I saw it forming. What is it, Hans?”

“I don’t know. But it’s changing.”

The column of light no longer ran from heaven to earth. Its upper end was fading, even as the lower part lifted, solidified, and took on a definite shape. It formed a glowing oval whose lower end hung three meters or so above the soaked earth. As they watched it changed further, into a perfect sphere that slowly drifted downward.

It was three meters above the wet vegetation—two meters, one meter, and still descending. As the lowest point made contact with the wet plants, the sphere emitted a flash of light so bright that the photosensitive faceplates of the suits instantly darkened to protect their eyes.

When they could see again the bright sphere had disappeared. But it had not vanished without leaving a trace. Where the sphere had touched down, something remained. Three somethings. Three suited human figures. Three people, back to back, sitting down on the wet hillside with legs outstretched in front of them.

As Darya watched in disbelief, one figure climbed slowly to its feet. It was facing away from the car, so she could not see into the faceplate of the suit. The person within would not at once see her.

A voice said, “Well, I suppose you’d have to say that this is an improvement. When you have been nowhere at all, and sitting under a force of two and a half gees while you were nowhere, almost anywhere else qualifies as better. But as to why we were brought here . . . ”

The words tailed off, but Darya did not need to hear more. Only one person in the Sagittarius Arm possessed that deep, hollow voice. The man standing with his back to the car was Julian Graves.

And with him, scrambling to their feet with expressions on their faces that suggested they were as surprised as Darya, were two others whom Darya recognized. There was no question that they were Torran Veck and Teri Dahl.

Which left only the biggest question of all. It was the one asked by Julian Graves of himself and his companions, but it applied equally well to Darya, Hans, and Ben: Why had they been brought here?