Summertide

CHAPTER 18 Summertide minus five

The Summer Dreamboat was well hidden.

The Pentacline Depression formed the most highly visible feature on the surface of Quake. One hundred and fifty kilometers across, packed with a riot of vivid and strongly growing vegetation, it could be seen from half a million kilometers away in space as a starfish splash of lurid green on Quake’s dusty gray surface. The Pentacline was also the lowest point on the planet. Its five valleys, radiating up and out like stretching arms from the central low, had to rise over eight hundred meters to reach the level of the surrounding plain.

The little starship had landed close to the middle of the Pentacline’s north-pointing arm, at a point where dense vegetation was broken by a small flat island of black basalt. But the ship had flown in to the bare outcrop on an angled descent and skated to its very edge. It was shielded from overhead inspection by vigorous new growth. Scarcely bigger than an aircar, the Summer Dreamboat was tucked neatly away under a canopy of five-meter leaf cover. It was empty, with all its life-support systems turned off. Only residual radiation from the Bose Drive betrayed its presence.

Max Perry stood inside the abandoned ship and stared around him with amazement. His head nearly touched the roof, and the whole living space was no more than three meters across. One step took him from the main hatch to the tiny galley; another, and he was at the control console.

He inspected the panel’s simple displays, with their couple of dozen brightly colored switches and indicators, and shook his head. “This is a damned toy. I didn’t know you could even get into the Bose Network with something this small.”

“You are not supposed to.” Graves had himself under firm control. He did not look quite sane, but the twitching of his fingers was less, and his bony face no longer boiled in a turmoil of emotion. “This was built as a small tourist vessel, for in-system hops. The designers didn’t expect a Bose Drive to be added, and certainly no one ever thought it might be used for so many Bose Transitions. But that’s Shasta for you — the children rule the planet. The Carmel twins talked their parents into it.” He turned to J’merlia. “Would you kindly tell Kallik to stop that, before she does something dangerous?”

The little Hymenopt was over by the ship’s drive. She had removed the cover and was peering inside. She turned at Graves’s words.

“It is not dangerous,” J’merlia interpreted, listening to the series of clicks and whistles. “With great respect, Kallik says that it is the opposite of dangerous. She is aware that someone as ignorant as she can know little about anything so difficult as the Bose Drive, but she is quite sure that this one’s power unit is exhausted. It cannot be used again. It is debatable that this ship could even make it from here to low orbit. She already suspected this, from the weak signal that her master’s ship received in its survey of the surface.”

“Which explains why the twins never left Quake.” Perry had turned on the display and was examining the computer log. “It makes sense of their peculiar itinerary, too. This shows a continued Bose Network sequence that brings them to Dobelle and then takes them right into Zardalu territory in two more transitions; but they couldn’t do that without a new Bose power source. They could have picked one up at Midway Station, but naturally they didn’t know it. So the only other place they could have gone in this system would have been Opal, and we’d have tracked their arrival there at once.”

“Which is unfortunately not the case here. So how will we find them?” Graves walked across to the door and peered out, snapping his finger joints. “I deserve censure, you know. I assumed that once we found the ship they came in, the hard task was over. It never occurred to me that they might be foolhardy enough to leave the ship and roam the planet’s surface.”

“I can help with that. But even if you find them, how will you handle the twins themselves?”

“Leave that to me. It is the area of my experience. We are creatures of conditioning, Commander. We assume that what we know is easy, and we find mysterious whatever we do not.” Graves waved a skinny, black-clad arm out toward the Pentacline. “All that to me is mysterious. They are hidden somewhere out there. But why would they leave this ship, and relative safety, to go to that?”

What could be seen from the ship was a green mass of vines, lush and intertwined. They trembled continuously to ground tremors, giving an illusion of self-awareness and nervous movement.

“They went there because they thought it was safe, and so they wouldn’t be found. But I can find them.” Perry glanced at his watch. “We have to be quick. It’s already hours since we left the beacon. J’merlia.” He turned to the apprehensive Lo’tfian. “We promised we’d have you back where we came from in four hours. And we will. Come on, Councilor. I know where they’ll be — alive or dead.”

Outside the ship the atmosphere of the depression felt thicker and more oppressive, ten degrees hotter than the plain. Black basalt quivered underfoot, hot and pulsing like the scaly hide of a vast beast. Perry walked along the edge of the rock, carefully examining it.

Graves followed, mopping at his perspiring brow. “If you are hoping to see footprints I hate to be discouraging, but—”

“No. Water prints.” Perry knelt down. “Runoff patterns. Quake has a lot of small lakes and ponds. The native animals manage fine, but they make do with water that you or I couldn’t drink. And once the Carmel twins left their ship, they’d need a supply of fresh water.”

“They might have had a purifier.”

“They would have, and they’d need it — fresh water on Quake is a relative term. You and I couldn’t drink it, nor could Geni and Elena Carmel.” Perry ran his hand over a smooth indented wedge in the rock. “If they’re alive, they’ll be within reach of water. And it doesn’t matter where they headed first, if they started out from this rock — and they must have, because the Summer Dreamboat is here — they’ll finish up along one of the runoff lines. Here’s one of them, a good strong one. There’s another over there, just about as well defined. But this rock slab is tilted and we’re on the lower side. We’ll try this one first.”

He lowered himself carefully over the edge. Graves followed, wincing as his hand met the basalt. The bare rock was beyond blood heat, almost hot enough to blister. Perry was moving away fast, scrambling along on his backside down a thirty-degree slope that plunged through a trailing curtain of purple-veined creepers.

“Wait for me!” Graves raised one arm to protect his eyes. Saw-edged leaves cut into the back of his hand and left their scratch marks along the top of his unprotected skull. Then he was through, under the tree-floor of vegetation that marked the first level of the Pentacline.

The light of Mandel and Amaranth was muted here to a blue-green shadow. Small creatures flew at them. Julius Graves thought at first that they were insects or birds, but a query to Steven brought the information that they were pseudocoelenterates, more like flying jellyfish than any other Earth or Miranda form. The creatures chittered in panic and flew away from Graves into the gloom. He hurried on after Max Perry. Within a few meters the air temperature beneath the canopy had jumped another few degrees.

Perry was following the rocky watercourse, squeezing his way past sticky yellow trunks and upthrusting mushroom structures two meters high. Clouds of minute winged creatures burst from the overhead leaves and flew for his unprotected face and hands.

“They don’t bite,” Perry said over his shoulder. “Just keep going.”

Graves swatted at them anyway, trying to keep them out of his eyes. He wondered why Perry had not brought masks and respirators with them. In his concentration he was not looking where he was going, and he walked into the other man’s back.

“Found something?”

Perry shook his head and pointed down. Two steps ahead the streambed dropped into a vertical hole. Graves leaned recklessly forward and could see no sign of the bottom.

“Let’s hope they’re not down there.” Perry was already turning back. “Come on.”

“What if the other one dead-ends, too?” Graves was snapping his finger joints again.

“Bad news. We’ll need a new idea, but we won’t have time for one even if we think of it. We’ll have to worry about ourselves.”

Rather than climbing back up the rock face, he led the way to one side, working his way slowly around the foot of the outcropping to where a second runoff flowed. Away from the watercourse the lower-level vegetation grew more strongly. Tough bamboo spears jutted up to knee level, scoring their boots and cutting through the cloth of their trousers. Irritant sap from broken leaves created lines of stinging cuts along their calves. Perry swore, but did not lessen his pace.

In another twenty meters he stopped and pointed. “There’s the other runoff. And something has been this way quite a few times.” The gray-green sedges at the side of the streambed had been flattened and broken. Their crushed stems were coated with a brown layer of dried sap.

“Animals?” Graves leaned down to rub at his scraped shins and calves, which had begun to itch maddeningly.

“Maybe.” Perry lifted his foot and pressed down on an unbroken stem, gauging its strength. “But I doubt it. Whatever flattened these wasn’t far from human body weight. I’ve never heard of anything in the Pentacline that massed more than a quarter as much. At least this makes it easy to track.”

He began to walk down the stream side, following the line of broken vegetation. The verdurous gloom had deepened, but the path was easy to follow. It ran parallel to the dry watercourse and then inched over into it. Thirty meters farther on, the bottom of the path became veiled by a thicket of tough ferns.

Graves put his hand on Perry’s shoulder and moved on past him.

“If you’re right,” he said quietly, “then from this point on it’s my show. Let me go in front, and alone. I’ll call you when I want you.”

Perry stared for a moment, then allowed Graves to step ahead of him. In the past five minutes the other had changed. Every sign of instability had vanished from his face, leaving in its place strength, warmth, and compassion. It was the countenance of a different man — of a councilor.

Graves stepped cautiously along the streambed until he was no more than a couple of paces from the veil of ferns. He paused, listening, then after a few seconds nodded and turned to Perry. He winked grotesquely, parted the ferns, and stepped through into the dark interior of the thicket.

It was the Carmel twins, it had to be; they had been located, although Perry would have given high odds against it when he, Graves, and Rebka had left Opal. But what was Graves saying to them, hidden away in the darkness?

A few minutes in the Pentacline so close to Summertide felt like hours. The heat and humidity was horrible. Perry looked again and again at his watch, hardly able to believe that time was passing so slowly. Though it was full day, and Mandel must still be rising, his surroundings grew less and less visible. Was there a dust storm brewing far overhead in the atmosphere? Perry stared straight up, but he could see nothing through the thick multiple layers of vegetation. Underfoot, however, there was plenty of evidence of Quake’s activity. The root-tangled forest floor was in continuous, steady vibration.

Thirty-five hours to Summertide Maximum.

The clock kept running in Perry’s head, along with a question. They had promised to return J’merlia and Kallik to where they had found them. That promise had been made in good faith and without reservations. But could they allow such a thing to be done, knowing that Quake would soon be a death trap to everything except its own uniquely selected organisms?

Perry was startled by a sudden bright light in front of him. The curtain of ferns had been pulled aside, and Graves stood behind it gesturing him forward.

“Come on in. I want you to hear this and serve as an additional witness.”

Max Perry eased his way in through the bristly fronds of the ferns. Lit from the interior, the dark thicket was revealed to be less than it seemed. The ferns formed only an outer framing web, a convenient natural fence within which stood a flexible tent supported by pneumatic ribbing. Graves was holding a door panel open, and when Perry stepped through he was astonished by the size of the interior. The floor area was at least ten meters square. Even with the inward-sloping walls the living area was substantial. And the furnishings were amazingly complete, everything that was needed for normal pleasant living. Some form of cooling and humidity-control unit was operating, to hold the internal conditions at a comfortable level. And it was well hidden from any normal searcher. No wonder the twins preferred to stay here, rather than in the cramped quarters of the Summer Dreamboat.

The tent must also have been totally lightproof, or else the lights had only just been turned on. But Perry had time for only one look at the line of glowing cylinders around the walls, before his attention was drawn to the tent’s occupants.

Elena and Geni Carmel were sitting over by the far wall, side by side, their hands on their knees. They were dressed in russet jumpsuits and wore their auburn hair hanging low over their foreheads. Perry’s first impression — an overwhelming one — was of two identical people, with the same resemblance to Amy that had left him unable to breath when he had first seen their pictures back on Opal.

But in the flesh, under the bright lights of the tent, reason quickly asserted itself. If the twins looked like Amy, it was through their dress and hairstyle. Elena and Geni Carmel seemed weary and crushed, as far as one could be from Amy’s perky and invincible self-confidence. The tan that he had seen in the image cubes was long gone, replaced by a tired pallor.

And the twins were different, one from the other. Although their features might be structurally identical, their expressions were not. One was clearly the dominant twin — born a few minutes earlier, maybe, or a fraction bigger and heavier?

She was the one meeting Max Perry’s eyes. The other kept her gaze downcast, shooting only one shy and lightning glance at the new arrival from large, heavy-lidded eyes. Yet she seemed at ease with Graves, turning her face to him as he closed the tent’s panel and moved to sit opposite them.

He waved Perry to a seat by his side. “Elena” — he indicated the more self-confident twin — “and Geni have been through a very difficult time.” His voice was gentle, almost subdued. “My dears, I know it is a painful memory, but I want you to repeat to the commander what you just told me… and this time we will make a recording of it.”

Geni Carmel gave Perry another hooded glance and looked to her sister for direction.

Elena gripped her knees more tightly with her hands. “From the beginning?” Her voice was deep for her slender frame.

“Not from the beginning. You don’t need to tell how you won the trip on Shasta — we have all that on record. I’d like you to begin with your arrival on Pavonis Four.” Graves held forward a small recording unit. “Whenever you are ready, we can begin.”

Elena Carmel nodded uncertainly and cleared her throat several times. “It was going to be the last planet,” she began at last. “The last one that we visited before we went back to Shasta. Before we went home.” Her voice cracked on the final word. “So we decided we would like to stay out on the surface, away from people. We bought special equipment” — she gestured around her — “this equipment, so we could live comfortably away from everything. And we took the Summer Dreamboat out to one of the dryland turf hummocks in the middle of the marshes — Pavonis Four is mostly marshes. We wanted to get right away from civilization, and we wanted to camp away from the ship.”

She paused.

“That was my fault,” Geni Carmel said, in a beaten voice a tone higher than her sister’s. “We’d seen so many people, on so many worlds, and the ship was smaller than we realized before we started. I was tired of living cramped up in it.”

“We were both tired.” Elena was defending her little sister. “We camped maybe thirty meters from the ship, close to the edge of the hummock. When twilight came we thought it would be a great idea to go really primitive, just as if we were back on Earth ten thousand years ago, and light a fire. We did that, and it was nice and warm, with no threat of rain. So we decided that we would even sleep outside. When it was completely dark, we put out sleeping bags next to each other, and lay looking up at the stars.” She frowned. “I don’t know what we talked about.”

“I do,” Geni said. “We talked about that being our last stop, and how dull it would be to go back to school on Shasta. We tried to see our own sun, but the constellations looked too different, and we weren’t sure where home was…” Her voice trailed off, and she glanced again at her sister.

“So we fell asleep.” Elena was speaking less easily. “And while we were asleep, they came. They — the—”

“The Bercia?” Julius Graves prompted. Both twins nodded.

“Wait a moment, Elena,” he went on. “I want to note for the record here a number of facts about the Bercia. These facts are well established and easily verified. The Bercia were large, slow vertebrates. As nocturnal amphibians, native to and unique to Pavonis Four, they were highly photophobic. In life-style they resembled Earth’s extinct beavers. Like beavers, they were communal and largely aquatic, and they built lodges. The main reason they were credited with possible intelligence is because of the complex structure of those lodges. And to make them, they employed mud and the trunks of the only treelike structures of Pavonis Four. Those grow only close to the dryland turf hummocks. It was therefore almost inevitable that the Bercia would appear at night by the hummock where the Carmel camp stood.”

He turned to Elena. “Did anyone ever tell you about the Bercia before you set out to camp? Who they were, what they looked like?”

“No.”

“Or you?” he asked, switching his attention to Geni Carmel.

She shook her head, then added, “No,” in an almost inaudible voice.

“So I would like to add the physical description of the Bercia to this record. All human experience with these beings suggests that they were gentle and totally herbivorous. However, to chew through the xylem of the tree trunks, the Bercia were equipped with heavy jaws and big, strong teeth.” He nodded to Elena Carmel. “Please continue. Describe the rest of your night on Pavonis Four.”

“I’m not sure when we went to sleep, or how long we slept.” Elena Carmel glanced at her sister. “I only woke up when I heard Geni cry out. She told me—”

“I want to hear it directly from Geni.” Graves pointed his finger at the other sister. “I know this is painful, but tell us what you saw.”

Geni Carmel looked terrified. Graves leaned forward and took her hands in his. He waited.

“Pavonis Four has one big moon,” Geni said at last. “I don’t sleep as soundly as Elena, and the full moonlight woke me up. At first I didn’t look around me — I just lay in my sleeping bag and stared up at the moon. I remember that it had a dark pattern on it, like a curved cross on top of a pyramid. Then something big moved in front of the moon. I thought it must be a cloud or something, and I didn’t realize how close it was until I heard it breathing. It leaning over me. I saw a flat, dark head, and a mouth full of pointed teeth. And I screamed for Elena.”

“Before we continue,” Graves said, “I would like to make another easily verified addition to this record. The planet Shasta, homeworld of Elena and Geni Carmel, has no dangerous carnivores. But at one time it did. The largest and most dangerous of those animals was a four-legged invertebrate known as a Skrayal. Although anatomically it in no way resembles a Bercia, it possessed the same superficial appearance and was roughly the same size and weight. Elena Carmel, what did you think when you realized that a Bercia was leaning over your sister, with a ring of them surrounding both your beds?”

“I thought — I thought that they were Skrayal. Just at first.” She hesitated, then words came in a rush. “Of course, when I got a good look at them and thought about it, I knew they couldn’t be, and anyway we had never seen Skrayal — they were gone before we were born. But all our stories and pictures were filled with them, and when I first woke up I didn’t even know where I was — all I saw were big animals, and the teeth of the one next to Geni.”

“What did you do?”

“I screamed, and picked up the light, and turned it on all the way.”

“Did you know that the Bercia were strongly photophobic and would go into terminal shock at high illumination levels?”

“I had no idea.”

“Did you know that the Bercia were possibly intelligent?”

“I told you, we’d never even heard of the Bercia. We found all that out later, after we checked the planetary data base on the Summer Dreamboat.”

“And so you had no way of knowing that those Bercia were the only surviving mature members of the species? And that the infant forms could not survive without adult care?”

“We didn’t know any of that. We learned it after we returned to Capra City and heard that we were being looked for so we could be arrested.”

“Councilor,” Perry interrupted. He was looking again at his watch. “We’ve been gone three hours. We have to get back.”

“Very well. We can pause here.” Graves picked up the recording instrument and turned to Elena and Geni Carmel. “There will have to be an inquiry and trial back on Shasta, in controlled conditions, and also a hearing on Miranda. But I can assure you, what you have told me is already enough to establish innocence of intent. You killed by accident, not knowing that you were killing, when you were terrified and half-asleep. There is still one mystery to me — why you fled. But that can wait for explanation.” He stood up. “Now I must take you both into my custody. From this moment, you are under arrest. And we must leave this place.”

The twins flashed split-second glances at each other.

“We won’t go,” they said in breathless unison.

“You must. You are in danger. We are all in danger.”

“We’ll stay here and take our chances,” Elena said.

Graves frowned at them. “You don’t understand. Commander Perry can give you details, but I’ll put it simply: you may feel safe enough just now, but there is no way you can survive Summertide if you stay here on Quake.”

“Leave us, then.” Elena Carmel was close to tears. “We’ll stay. If we die, that ought to be enough punishment to satisfy everybody.”

Graves sighed and sat down again. “Commander Perry, you must go. Get back to the others and take off. I cannot leave.”

Perry remained standing, but he took a sidearm from his belt and pointed it at the twins. “This can kill, but it can also be used at stunner setting. If the councilor chooses, we can take you to the aircar unconscious.”

The young women stared apprehensively at the weapon, but Graves was shaking his head. “No, Commander,” he said wearily. “That is no solution. We’d never drag the pair of them up that slope, and you know it. I will stay. You must leave, and tell J’merlia and Kallik what has happened.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “And go quickly, before it’s too late.”

A rumble of thunder, far overhead, added weight to his words. Perry looked up, but did not leave.

“Tell me why.” Graves went on. He opened his eyes, stood up slowly, and began to pace the length of the tent. “Tell me why you won’t come back with me. Do you think that I’m your enemy — or that the governors of the Alliance are all cruel monsters? Do you believe that the whole system of justice is set up to torment and torture young women? That the Council would condone any mistreatment of you? If it would help, I can give you my personal promise that you will not be harmed if you go with me. But please, tell me what you are so afraid of.”

Elena Carmel looked questioningly at her sister. “Can we?” And then, at Geni’s nod, she spoke. “There would be treatment for us. Rehabilitation. Wouldn’t there?”

“Well, yes.” Graves paused in his pacing. “But only to help you. It would take away the pain of the memory — you don’t want to go through the rest of your life reliving that night on Pavonis Four. Rehab isn’t punishment. It’s therapy. It wouldn’t hurt you.”

“You can’t guarantee that,” Elena said. “Isn’t rehab supposed to help with mental problems — any mental problems?”

“Well, it’s always focused on some particular incident or difficulty. But it helps in all areas.”

“Even with a problem that we might not think is a problem.” Geni Carmel took the lead for the first time. “Rehab would make us ‘saner.’ But we’re not sane, not by the definition you and the Council will use.”

“Geni Carmel, I have no idea what you are talking about, but no one is totally sane.” Graves sighed and rubbed the top of his bald head. “Least of all me. But I would undergo rehab willingly, if it were judged necessary.”

“But suppose you had a problem you didn’t want cured?” Elena asked. “Something that was more important to you than anything in the world.”

“I’m not sure I can imagine such a thing.”

“You see. And you represent Council thinking.” Geni said. Human species thinking.”

“You are human, too.”

“But we’re different,” Elena said. “Did you ever hear of Mina and Daphne Dergori, from our world of Shasta?”

There was a puzzled pause. “I did not,” Graves replied. “Should I have?”

“They are sisters,” Elena said. “Twin sisters. We knew them since we were little children. They are our age, and we have lots in common. But they and their whole family were involved in a spaceship accident. Almost everyone was killed. Mina and Daphne and three other children were thrown into the pinnace at the last moment by a crew member, and they survived. When they got back home they were given rehab. To help them forget.”

“I’m sure they were.” Graves glanced at Perry, who was gesturing again at his watch. “And I’m sure it worked. Didn’t it?”

“It helped them forget the accident.” Geni was pale, and her hands were shaking. “But don’t you see? They lost each other.”

“We knew them well,” Elena said. “We understood them. They were just like us; they had the same closeness to each other. But after rehab, when we saw them again… it was gone. Gone completely. They were no more to each other than other people.”

“And you would do it to us,” Geni added. “Can’t you understand that’s worse than killing us?”

Graves stood motionless for a few moments, then flopped loose-limbed into a chair. “And that’s why you ran away from Pavonis Four? Because you thought we would take you away from each other?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Elena said. “Wouldn’t you have wanted to give us ‘normal’ and ‘independent’ lives, so we could live apart? Isn’t that included in rehab?”

“Lord of Lords.” Graves’s face was back to its spastic twitching. He covered it with his hands. “Would we have done that? Would we? We would, we would.”

“Because closeness and dependence on each other is ‘unnatural,’ ” Elena said bitterly. “You would have tried to cure us. We can’t stand that idea. That’s why you’ll have to kill us before we will go with you. So go now, and leave us with each other. We don’t want your cure. If we die, at least we die together.”

Graves did not seem to be listening. “Blind,” he muttered. “Blind for years, filled with my own hubris. Convinced that I had a gift, so sure that I could understand any human. But can an individual relate fully to a compound being? Is there that much empathy? I doubt it.”

He straightened up, walked across to the two women, and put his open hands together in a gesture of prayer. “Elena and Geni Carmel, listen to me. If you will come with me now and agree to rehabilitation for what happened on Pavonis Four, you will not be separated. Never. There will never be an attempt to ‘treat’ your need to be together, or to break your closeness. You will continue to share your lives. I swear this to you, with every atom of my body, with my full authority as a member of the Alliance Council.”

He dropped his hands to his sides and turned away. “I know I am asking you to trust me more than is reasonable. But please do it. Discuss this with each other. Commander Perry and I will wait outside. Please talk… and tell me that you will come.”

The Carmel twins smiled for the first time since Perry had entered the tent.

“Councilor,” Elena said quietly, “you are right when you say that you do not understand twins. Don’t you understand that you do not need to leave, and we do not need to talk to each other? We both know what the other feels and thinks.”

The two women stood up in unison and spoke together. “We will come with you. When must we leave?”

“Now.” Perry had been a silent bystander, glancing from the three people before him to his watch and back. For the first time, he accepted the idea that Julius Graves had a gift for dealing with people that Perry himself would never have. “We all have to leave this minute. Grab what you absolutely need, but nothing else. We’ve been down here longer than we expected. Summertide is less than thirty-three hours away.”

The aircar rose from the black basalt surface.

Too slow, Max Perry said to himself. Too slow and sluggish. What’s this car’s load limit? I bet we’re close to it.

He said nothing to the others, but his internal tension willed them upward, until they were cruising at a safe height back the way they had come.

Apparently the others did not share his worries. Elena and Geni Carmel appeared exhausted, lying back in their seats at the rear of the car and staring wearily out at the glowing sky. Graves was back to his old manic cheerfulness, querying J’merlia, and through him Kallik, about the Zardalu clade and Kallik’s own homeworld. Perry decided that it was probably Steven again, busy in simple information gathering.

Perry had little time himself for watching the others, or for conversation. He was tired, too — it was more than twenty-four hours since he had slept — but nervous energy kept him wide awake. In the past few hours Quake’s atmosphere had passed through a transition. Instead of flying under a dusty but sunlit sky, the aircar sped beneath continuous layers of roiling cloud, black and rusty-red. They needed to be safely above those clouds, but Perry dared not risk the force of unknown wind shears. Even at the car’s present height, well below the clouds, violent patches of turbulence came and went unpredictably. It was not safe to fly the car at more than half its full speed. Jagged bolts of lightning, showing as dusky red through windblown dust, ran between sky and surface. Every minute the lower edge of the cloud layer crept closer toward the ground.

Perry looked down. He could see a dozen scattered lakes and ponds, steaming and shrinking, giving up their stored moisture to the atmosphere. Quake needed the protection of that layer of water vapor to shield it from the direct rays of Mandel and Amaranth.

What could not be shielded were the growing tidal forces. The ground around the shrinking lakes was beginning to fracture and heave. Conditions were steadily worsening as the car flew closer to the place where J’merlia and Kallik had been found.

Perry wrestled the car’s controls and wondered. A landing in these conditions would be difficult. How long would it take to drop J’merlia and Kallik at their car and move back to the relative safety of the air? And if there was no sign of Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda, could they leave the two slaves alone on the surface?

They had not much farther to go. In ten more minutes he would have to make the decision.

And in thirty hours, Summertide would be here. He risked a slight increase in airspeed.

A glow of ruddy light began to appear in the sky ahead. Perry peered at it with tired eyes.

Was it Amaranth, seen through a break in the clouds? Except that no cloud break was visible. And the bright area was too low in the sky.

He stared again, reducing speed to a crawl until he was sure. When he was finally certain, he turned in his seat.

“Councilor Graves, and J’merlia. Would you come forward, please, and give me your opinion on this?”

It was a formality. Perry did not need another opinion. In the past few hours there had been intense vulcanism in the area ahead. Right where J’merlia and Kallik had been picked up, the surface glowed orange-red from horizon to horizon. Smoking rivers of lava were creeping through a blackened and lifeless terrain, and nowhere, from horizon to horizon, was there a place for an aircar to land.

Perry felt a shiver of primitive awe at the sight — and a great sense of relief.

He did not have to make a decision after all. Quake had made it for him. They could head at once for the safety of the Umbilical.

The arithmetic was already running in his head. Seven hours’ flight time from their current location. Add in a margin for error, in case they had to fly around bad storms or reduce airspeed, and say it might take as much as ten. And it would be eighteen hours before the Umbilical withdrew from the surface of Quake.

That was an eight-hour cushion. They would make it with time to spare.