Summertide

CHAPTER 22 Summertide

Ten seconds after her foot plunged into that boiling black mud, Darya Lang’s nervous system went into suspended animation. She did not feel pain, she did not feel worry, she did not feel sorrow.

She knew, abstractly, that Max Perry was burned worse than she and was somehow leading the way up the rocky slope, but that much effort and involvement was beyond her. If she remained conscious, it was only because she knew no way to slip into unconsciousness. And if she traveled up to the ship with the rest of them, it was only because Kallik and J’merlia gave her no choice. They lifted and carried her, careful to keep her foot and ankle clear of the ground.

Her isolation ended — agonizingly — as they approached the ship’s entry port. Darts of pain began to lance through her foot and ankle as Kallik laid her gently on the ground.

“With apologies and extreme regrets,” J’merlia said quietly, his dark mandibles close to her ear. “But the way in is big enough for only one. It will be necessary to enter alone.”

They were going to put her down and ask her to walk, just when the pain was becoming intolerable! Her burned foot would have to meet the floor. She began to plead with the aliens, to tell them that she could not bear it. It was already too late. She found herself balanced on one leg in front of the hatch.

“Hurry up,” Max Perry urged from inside the ship.

She gave him a look of hatred. Then she saw his hands and forearms, blistered and split to the bone from contact with rough stones and pebbles during the ascent of the rock. He had to be feeling far worse than she was. Darya gritted her teeth, lifted her left foot clear of the ground, grabbed the sides of the doorframe, and hopped gingerly inside the ship. There was hardly room for the people already there. Somehow she managed to crawl across to the ship’s side window and stood there on one leg.

What should she do? She could not stand there indefinitely, and she could not bear the thought of anything touching her foot.

Rebka’s announcement that he would take them up to space at three gees answered that. His words filled her with dismay. She could hardly stand in a field of less than one gee. She would have to lie down, and then three gees of acceleration would press her ruined foot to the unforgiving floor.

Before she could say anything, Kallik’s stubby body wriggled across toward her. The Hymenopt placed her soft abdomen next to Darya’s injured foot and uttered a dozen soft whistles.

“No! Don’t touch it!” Darya cried out in panic.

As she tried to move her leg away, the gleaming yellow sting emerged from the end of Kallik’s body. It pierced inches deep into her lower calf. Darya screamed and fell over backward, banging her head as she went on the supply chest behind the pilot’s seat.

Liftoff began before she could move again.

Darya found she was flattened to the floor with her foot pressing onto metal. Her hurt foot! She had to scream. She opened her mouth and suddenly realized that the only parts of her body that were not in pain were that foot and calf. Kallik’s sting had robbed them of all feeling.

She lay back and turned her head to rest its increased weight on her cheek and ear. A tangle of bodies covered the floor. She could see Kallik, right in front of her, cushioning Geni Carmel’s head on her furry abdomen. Julius Graves lay just beyond, but all she could see was the top of his bald pate, lying next to J’merlia’s shiny black cranium. Rebka, piloting the ship, and Max Perry, harnessed into the seat next to him, were hidden by the supply chest and the seat back.

Darya made a great effort and turned her head the other way. She could see out of the ship’s side port, a foot away from her. Unbelievably — surely they had been rising for minutes — the ship was still below Quake’s cloud layer. She caught a vivid lightning-lit view of the surface; it had shattered into crisscrossing fault lines, over which waves of orange-red molten lava were sweeping like ocean billows. The whole planet was on fire, a scene of ancient perdition. Then the ship lifted into black dust clouds so dense that the end of the vestigial control surfaces, just a few feet beyond the port, became invisible to her.

The turbulence and shear forces tripled. Darya rolled helplessly against Kallik, and both of them went sliding across the floor to collide with Julius Graves. Another moment, and all three were tumbling back, to crush Darya against the wall. She was still in that position, pinned by the weight of everyone except Rebka and Perry, when the Summer Dreamboat emerged unexpectedly from the clouds of Quake. The ship’s port admitted one sunburst of intolerable golden radiation before the photoshielding came into operation.

Darya was lucky. She was facing away from the port, and she happened to have her head caught under Kallik’s abdomen when that searing light-blast hit the ship. Everyone else in the rear compartment was blinded for a few seconds.

Rebka and Perry had been protected in the front seats, but they were facing forward and trying to coax a ship to orbit in circumstances for which it had never been designed. So it was Darya alone, turning to look sideways and out behind the ascending ship, who saw everything that happened next.

The Dreamboat was soaring over the hemisphere of Quake that faced away from Opal. The disks of Mandel and Amaranth loomed low in the sky to her left. Reduced by the photoshielding to glowing, dark-limbed circles, the twin stars showed their bright disks pocked and speckled with sunspots. Their tidal forces were tearing at each other, just as they tore at Quake and Opal. Directly overhead, Gargantua shone pale and spectral, a giant whose reflected light was reduced by the photoshielding to a faint and insubstantial ghost world.

From a point very close to Gargantua’s edge — Darya could not be sure quite where it lay, on the planet or off it — a glittering blue beam stabbed suddenly down toward Quake, bright with controlled energy.

Darya followed it with her eyes. It could not be a beam of ordinary light. That would be invisible in empty space, and she could see it all the way along its length. And where that pulsing ray from Gargantua struck the clouds, the dust-filled protective layer boiled instantly away. A circular area of Quake’s surface, a hundred kilometers across, was suddenly exposed to Mandel and Amaranth’s combined radiation. Already seething with molten lava, the surface started to deform and crater. A dark tunnel formed and became rapidly deeper and wider. Soon Darya could see the molten rocks of the planet’s interior thrown back in waves to form a sputtering, sharp-sided edge to the hole.

The ship’s motion was carrying Darya away from the tunnel, and her viewing angle was too steep to see the bottom of the pit. She leaned closer to the port, ignoring the pain in her bruised body and face. As the ship’s altitude increased, Quake hung below her like a great, clouded bead, threaded onto that pencil of bright blue light. Where the ray struck, the dark hole through the bead was lit by a glowing rim of molten lava.

The next events came in such quick succession that Darya had trouble afterward in relating their exact sequence.

As Quake’s rotation was taking first Mandel and then Amaranth below the horizon, a second blue beam came stabbing down from open space to merge with the one from Gargantua. It did not come from any object that Darya could find in the sky, although her eye could follow it up and up, until it finally became a line too faint to see.

The new pencil of light skewered the tunnel in Quake’s crust, and the hole widened — not steadily, but in one impossible jerk of displaced material. Narrow answering beams of red and cyan thrust back into space, following the exact center of the incident ones. And in the same moment, two silvery spheres crept forward from the depths of the tunnel.

They looked identical, each maybe a kilometer across. Rising slowly clear of Quake they hovered motionless, one just beneath the other, wobbling like two transparent balloons filled with quicksilver.

The blue beams changed color. The one from Gargantua became bright saffron, the other a glowing magenta. The pulses along their length changed in frequency. As they did so, the higher sphere began to accelerate, moving along the precise line of the magenta ray. Slow at first, then suddenly faster, it remained visible for only a split second and then was gone. Darya could not tell if it had been propelled out of sight — at huge acceleration — or had vanished through some other mechanism. As it disappeared, so did the magenta beam.

The second sphere still hovered motionless close to Quake. After a few moments it began to inch up along the saffron pencil of light. But its motion was leisurely, almost ponderous. Darya could follow it easily, a ball of silver climbing the saffron beam like a metal spider ascending its own thread. She tracked the shining globe as it crept upward.

And then her eyes were suddenly unable to focus. Around the bright ball the starfield had become twisted and distorted. The ball itself disappeared to become a black void, while around it scattered points of starlight converged and met in an annular rainbow cluster. The vanished sphere formed an ink-black center to that brilliant stellar ring. Still it ascended the yellow light beam.

While she was squinting at that hole in space, the Dreamboat performed a dizzying half roll and a surge at maximum thrust. She heard Hans Rebka, in the pilot’s seat, cry out. A bright jet of violet, a starship’s drive working at high intensity, flared across the starfield and moved across the bows of the Dreamboat.

Darya turned her head and saw the blunt lines of a Zardalu Communion vessel swooping in close to them. Concealed weapons ports sprang open on the ship’s forward end.

The Dreamboat was the target — and at that range, there was no way the other ship could miss.

Darya watched in horror as all the weapons fired. She expected their ship to disintegrate around her. But impossibly, the attacking beams were veering away from their expected straight lines. They missed the Dreamboat completely and curved into space, drawn to meet the black sphere as it hung suspended on its golden thread of light.

The beams of the ship’s weapons remained visible as glowing trajectories in space, coupling the Zardalu vessel with the dark ascending globe. The curved lines shortened. The other ship moved closer to the distorted dark region, as though the sphere were reeling in bright strands from the weapons.

But the Zardalu ship was not going willingly. Its drive flared to the brighter violet of maximum intensity, thrusting away from the sphere’s dark singularity. Darya could sense the struggle of huge opposed forces.

And the starship was losing. Caught in the field’s curvature, it moved along the twisting lines of force, drawn irresistibly toward the rising sphere. The sphere itself was moving upward, faster and faster. It seemed to Darya that the Zardalu vessel was sucked into that black void, one moment before the sphere itself flashed up the yellow thread and disappeared.

Then the Summer Dreamboat was moving on, around the curve of Quake. Gargantua sank below the horizon, and with it all sign of the pulsing beam of yellow.

“I don’t know if anyone cares anymore.” It was Rebka’s laconic voice, startling Darya back to an awareness of where she was. “But I just checked the chronometer. Summertide Maximum took place a few seconds ago. And we’re in orbit.”

Darya turned to look down at Quake. There was nothing to see but dark, endless clouds and, beyond them, on the horizon, the blue-gray sphere of Opal.

Summertide. It was over. And it had been nothing like she had imagined. She glanced over at the others, still rubbing their eyes as they lay on the starship floor, and felt a terrible sense of letdown. To see everything — but to understand nothing! The whole visit to Quake at Summertide was an unsolved mystery, a waste of time and human lives.

“The good news is that we reached orbit.” Rebka was speaking again, and Darya could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “The bad news is that the fancy flying we had to do a few moments ago took what little power we had left. We probably have Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial to thank for that. I don’t have any idea what was going on back there, or what happened to that other ship, and I really don’t care. I hope Nenda and H’sial got their comeuppance, but right now I don’t have time to bother with it. I’m worried about us. Without power, we can’t make a planetary landing on Opal, or on Quake, or anywhere else. Commander Perry is working up a trajectory that may take us to Midway Station. If we get lucky we might be able to ride the Umbilical from there.”

Working up a trajectory, Darya thought. How can he? Perry doesn’t have hands, just burned bits of meat.

But he’ll do it, hands or no hands. And if his foot were burned like mine, he’d walk on it. He’d run on it, too, if he had to. Hans Rebka talks of luck, but they’ve not had much of that. They’ve had to make their own.

I’ll never mock the Phemus Circle again. Their people are dirty and disgusting and poor and primitive, but Rebka and Perry and the rest of them have something that makes everyone in the Alliance seem half-dead. They have the will to live, no matter what happens.

And then, because she was becoming steadily more relaxed and sluggish in response to the anesthetic and mildly toxic fluid that Kallik had injected, and because Darya Lang could never stop thinking, even when she wanted to, her mind said to her: “Umbilical. We’re going to the Umbilical.”

The least of the Builder artifacts; she knew that, everyone knew that. An insignificant nothing of a structure, on the Builder scale of things. But it was to that very place, to that least of all artifacts, and to that very time, of Summertide Maximum, that all the other Builder artifacts had pointed.

Why? Why not point to one of the striking artifacts — to Paradox or Sentinel, to Elephant or Cocoon or Lens?

Now there’s a worthwhile mystery, Darya thought: a puzzle that someone could usefully ponder. Let’s forget the mess we’re in and think about that for a while. I can’t help Rebka and Perry, and anyway I don’t need to. They’ll take care of me. So let’s think.

Let’s wonder about the two spheres that came out from the deep interior of Quake. How long had they been there? Why were they there? Where did they go? Why did they choose this moment to emerge, and what made the black one take the Zardalu ship with it?

The questions went unanswered. As Kallik’s narcotic venom spread steadily through her bloodstream, Darya was sinking toward unconsciousness. There was too little time left for thinking. Her concentration was gone, her energy was gone, and her brain drifted randomly from one subject to another. Drugged sleep was moments away.

But in the last moment, the single second before her mind vanished into vague emptiness, Darya caught the gleam of a new insight. She understood the significance of Quake and Summertide! She knew its function, and maybe their own role in it. She reached out for the thought, struggled to pull it to her, sought to fix it firmly in her memory.

It was too late. Darya, still fighting, floated irresistibly into sleep.