The Spheres of Heaven

9: EXPLORING LIMBO

The ocean of Limbo seemed as peaceful as ever, but Bony made a careful survey of his surroundings as he drifted out of the airlock.

No sign of bubble creatures. Small purple objects like floating umbrellas opened and closed to jet rapidly away from him, but they seemed more afraid of Bony than he was of them. He waved to Liddy, peering from the airlock, to join him. While she was doing it he made sure that the line connecting him to the Mood Indigo was clear, then cracked open the suit’s internal pressure valve. His buoyancy became slightly greater, enough to begin a slow rise through limpid water.

He looked down. Liddy was following him upward, her slim figure hidden within the bloat of her over-inflated suit. One of the annoyances of the situation was that radios meant for space use were no good under water. Although Bony could talk to Friday Indigo at long distance via the wire connection to the ship, underwater he could speak to Liddy only when they were close enough for sound waves to move directly between them. That meant they could not afford to get too far apart. He brushed his glove across his faceplate to rid it of the annoying layer of tiny bubbles that coated it after a minute or two in the superaerated ocean. High oxygen content must help the native sea-creatures, but to humans in suits it was a nuisance — like moving inside a gigantic bottle of soda water.

The light level was steadily growing brighter, just as it had when he ascended the undersea ridge. In the cumbersome suit it was difficult to bend his head to look upward. He craned back for a quick look and fancied that he could make out moving variations in intensity above him. Wave patterns, travelling across the surface? That would mean the ship could not be more than thirty meters down.

Before he could confirm that guess, his head burst through into dazzling sunlight. The photoreceptors in his helmet recorded an overdose of ultraviolet and modified the faceplate at once to screen out most of it. As he floated at the surface, chest-deep and feet-down, Liddy’s suit bobbed up a few meters away. A long, sluggish wave gently lifted them and then lowered them as they paddled toward each other.

Bony tried the radio circuit. “Liddy?”

“I hear you. My suit shows a really high light level. Does yours?”

“Yes. It’s real. There’s the culprit.” He raised an arm and pointed at the sun. “It’s a blue giant type. That’s really strange.”

“You mean it looks strange. That’s not surprising.”

“No. I mean it is strange. For a planet around a blue giant star, every astronomer will tell you that there should be no life-forms. A star can’t stay in a blue giant stage long enough for anything alive to develop on its planets.”

“Tell that to those funny little umbrella things down near the seabed. They don’t seem to know much astronomy. Bony, can Friday hear us?”

“Only when I have something we want to transmit. Do you need to talk to him? The circuit is off at the moment.”

“No. I was thinking I might feel like saying things I wouldn’t want him to hear. We’re really away from him for the first time, just the two of us. Isn’t it great?”

Bony had mixed feelings about that. Sure, it was great not to have Friday ordering him around or using Liddy as a personal sex toy. But out of the frying pan …

As another wave lifted them he stared all around, seeking any sign of the winged mystery that had cast the tri-lobed underwater shadow on his first trip outside. He saw nothing like it, but far off to his left he caught a glimpse of a long horizontal line across the face of the sea. Land? Or clouds? Before he could confirm anything they were dropping back into the trough.

“Liddy, look that way when we hit the crest of another wave.” He pointed. “I thought I saw something on the skyline. Could be clouds — if this planet has clouds.”

While they waited he opened the circuit to the Mood Indigo . “We’re at the surface, and in a little while I’m going to try the suit thrustors. They ought to move us about up here even if they have problems lower down. If I have to release our connecting line to give us more mobility, I will. We won’t lose the line. The buoy stays on the surface and the beacon will let us find it easily enough from any distance.”

A grunt from Friday Indigo, and that was all.

One more device that Bony had made from nothing and his boss took for granted. Apparently that’s what it was like when you had enough money to buy anything, including people’s brains and bodies. Bony broke the circuit to the ship before the captain could veto his proposal, and made sure that he could unhook the line and beacon easily from his suit. He was still busy with that when he heard Liddy’s excited voice.

“It’s not just clouds, Bony. It’s clouds and land .”

He stared, but too late. They were again dropping into a trough. “Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be without going over and standing on it. See for yourself. Wait for the next crest and you can watch waves breaking on the shore.”

If there was land, it was their best hope of escape. The planet’s gravity field was weak, and the ship’s drive should certainly function in an atmosphere.

But which atmosphere? The water samples he had analyzed back on the ship showed a high level of dissolved oxygen. That was encouraging — the only place it could come from was the air at the surface.

Bony glanced at his suit monitors. They were designed to warn if anything in the ambient environment was dangerous to humans. No red lights blinked. That didn’t mean you could breathe whatever was outside. An excess of carbon dioxide would not show as dangerous, but try to breathe that for long and you would be in trouble.

“See?” It was Liddy’s cry. “It is land.”

He had missed it again. He paddled over until he was again right next to her. “Liddy, I’m going to do two things. I want you to watch, but I don’t want you too close. If anything goes wrong, follow the line and go back down.”

He unhooked the buoy and beacon from his suit, as she said nervously, “Bony, you mustn’t do anything silly. I won’t allow it.”

“I’ll try not to. The first thing I want to do is pretty straightforward. If we’re to get anywhere at all on the surface in a reasonable time, we won’t manage it by paddling. We must try our drives. So I’m going to use my suit thrustors to make sure they work and don’t fizzle or blow up or do something else weird. I want you to stay right where you are. Don’t follow me.”

He swam slowly away until there were thirty or forty meters between them. He used his arms to turn in the water so that he was facing Liddy, and tried to sound more confident than he felt. “All right. Here I come.”

He turned on the rear suit thrustors, keeping the setting to a medium level. That was just as well. Even on medium impulse he went racing through the water at a slight downward angle. The level rose on either side of his helmet and suddenly he was submerged and could see nothing but blue-green bubbles. He cut the thrust at once. When he bobbed up to the surface he was face-to-face with Liddy and only inches away from her. The expression of surprise and relief showing through her visor should have been comical. It wasn’t. It was merely reasonable, because Bony felt the same way himself.

He said, he hoped calmly, “I guess that’s a success. Be careful when you use yours, and keep it to a low or medium thrust level. Now for a trickier one. I’m going to let some outside air into my suit.”

“Bony, that’s dangerous. Suppose it’s a poisonous gas?”

“I don’t see how it can be. We know that the gas dissolved in the sea is mostly oxygen, and there must be a balance between what’s in the water and what’s in the air above it. The big question is, how much oxygen? It won’t kill me, but too little or too much and I’ll pant and pass out. Keep an eye on me and be ready to seal my suit.”

“Bony, please don’t.”

“We must. I don’t know how long we may have to stay on Limbo, and we don’t want to have to live in space-suits indefinitely.”

Bony made sure that the neck seal was tight, so that the rest of the suit would remain inflated even when the helmet was cracked open. The air pressure inside most of the suit had to remain higher than outside. Otherwise he would sink like a stone when the helmet pressure equalized.

He found himself holding his breath as air hissed from the suit. That was ridiculous, about as sensible as a man being hanged trying to delay execution by jumping up into the air a moment before the trapdoor opened. The whole point was to get this over as fast as possible.

His ears were popping. As the air escaped he sank a few inches deeper into the water. Now air was entering his helmet. The smell of an alien sea was in his nostrils. Bony opened his mouth wide and gulped in the air of Limbo.

He felt a moment of dizziness and panic. He was panting, his vision blurred, and something was catching in his throat and burning at his lungs. He thought of Liddy’s worries about poisonous gases. Then he realized that the strange sensation was almost surely the effects of a high ozone level. That made logical sense. The blue giant sun delivered a sleet of ultraviolet light to Limbo, and UV had the effect of ionizing oxygen to form the triatomic molecule of ozone.

The act of rational thought had its own steadying effect. His breathing slowed. His vision cleared and he saw Liddy reaching up to seal his helmet.

“No.” He took her hands in his. “It’s all right. I can breathe. The air pressure is a bit lower but the oxygen content is higher. I’m not sure what the long-term effects might be, but provided we always go back and sleep in the ship I think we’ll be all right.”

Liddy said suddenly, “Fine. It’s my turn. I’m going to open my helmet and breathe it, too.”

“Wait a minute.” Another big wave was arriving. Lifted high, Bony for the first time was looking in the right direction at the right time. He saw a black mass bulging up from the sea, with a narrow band of sparkling white in front of it.

Land, and a line of breakers, no more than a few kilometers away.

“Hold off for the moment, Liddy. If we’re going ashore we won’t want open helmets while we’re doing it. I’m going to close mine, then I’ll show you how to use the thrustors.”

It took a couple of false starts. The first time, Liddy set the wrong thrust angle. She was driven under water and popped up forty meters away like the bloated corpse of some sea-monster. The second time Bony used too high a thrust setting. He skated helplessly across the surface at speed and was buffeted hard by waves. Over the suit radio he could hear Liddy laughing at him.

The seabed’s ascent as it approached the land formed a gentle incline. Waves began to break two hundred meters offshore, and with a hundred meters still to go Bony and Liddy could touch bottom.

The shore itself was a bleak shingle of black and brown stones. Bony waded the final ten meters and sank to his knees.

Liddy moved anxiously to his side. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just looking for something. If you want to open your suit now it ought to be all right. I suggest you sit down before you do it — I felt dizzy for a few moments.”

She flopped down at his side. Bony heard the hiss of escaping air, followed by Liddy’s calm voice, “You said looking. Looking for what?”

Apparently his own discomfort had mostly been nervousness. He would never make a hero. Bony said, “Looking for signs of life. Little crabs, shrimp, sand fleas, barnacles, stuff like that.” He turned over handfuls of pebbles. “I don’t see anything alive. Not even plants. Do you?”

“Nothing. But you saw all sorts on the seabed, didn’t you? Plants and animals. What does it mean?”

Bony stood up and gazed farther inland, to where black rocks rose to a jagged skyline. “If it’s the same up there, and it’s my guess it is, then regardless of what we find in the sea we won’t have to worry about danger on land. Remember I was saying that you ought not to find life on a planet around a blue giant star, because it wouldn’t have had enough time to develop?”

“And I pointed out that the theory is obviously wrong. There is life on Limbo.”

“But I think the astronomers are half right. Back on Earth, there was life in the sea for billions of years before it emerged onto the land. That’s what we have here on Limbo. Lots of plants and animals in the sea, nothing above the surface.” Bony leaned his head back and squinted up into the dazzling sky. “I wonder if there’s a moon? We might find out if we could stay here until dark, but long before that we’d better be back on the ship.”

“A moon . I thought you said it was the type of sun that makes the difference?”

“A moon causes tides. Plants and animals that live in shallow water close to the shore get stranded by the tides, and over time they evolve so that they can live on land or in water. At least, that’s the theory.”

“Do you know every useless piece of information in the universe?”

She was teasing him. Bony didn’t mind at all. They were on an alien world, in the middle of some God-know’s-where mystery region known as the Geyser Swirl. They had no idea how, when, or if they would return home — or even if they would get back safely to the Mood Indigo before dark. It ought to be quite impossible to relax. Yet here he was, ridiculously cheerful and gratified by the sight of Liddy laughing at his side.

“Not every useless thing, no.” He stood up, turning to gaze out beyond the breakers. “But when you’re alone a lot, learning helps to take your mind off it.”

She stood up, too. “Were you alone?”

“All the time, when I was a kid.” Bony had been searching the horizon for any sign of the great clover-leaf shape that had swept overhead when he was down on the seabed. Suddenly he realized the total lack of logic in his action. If life had yet to move out of the sea on Limbo, no winged creature could have taken to the air. Whatever he had seen was a sea-creature. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a look farther inland.”

“Why were you alone?” Liddy fell into step beside him. “And where were you alone?”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“I’ll decide that — after you tell me. Come on, Bony. I’d tell you anything.”

“I warn you, it’s not very interesting.” How much was he going to tell her, after so many hidden years? Well, the first part was safe enough. “You seemed surprised because I’d heard of the Leah Rainbow Academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk. You shouldn’t have been. I was born on Earth. I was a Gallimaufries kid like you.”

“You didn’t tell me that! You said you’d just read about Earth and the Leah Rainbow Academy.”

“I know. It was a reasonable statement; almost everything else I know came through reading. I wasn’t like you. To get picked out and taken into the Academy, even back then you must have already been absolutely gorgeous. You know, people say about the Academy — at the Academy, did you — I mean, did they teach you how to—”

“None of your business. You may find out one day, but it won’t be through asking about it.” Liddy hooked her arm through his. “So we have lots in common. Both from Earth, both born as Gallimaufry kids.”

“I didn’t say that.” Bony wished they weren’t wearing suits. He couldn’t even feel Liddy’s grip on his arm. “I wasn’t born in the Gallimaufries, the way you were. And you must have been slim and beautiful. I was already fat and clumsy.”

“Lots of kids are. No big problem.”

“It was for me. My last name is Rombelle now; but when I was born it was Mirambelle.”

She stopped dead, her boots grating loud on the barren basaltic rock of the slope. “You’re a Mirambelle?”

“I was. Though you would never have known it.” Bony knew the image that was in Liddy’s mind. The Miraculous Mirambelles, poised and confident, aerialist builders with a grace and sense of balance that would shame a cat or a squirrel, directing the robot spinners in their monofilament spans three thousand meters above the ground. In seven generations, no Mirambelle had ever suffered a fall.

Bony felt that he could not breathe, his lungs were as starved as if the air of Limbo had suddenly lost all oxygen. He went on, “Naturally, my parents didn’t want me anywhere near ultrahigh construction. Not on the ground, either. Too hard on me, they said. Also, of course, I would ruin the Mirambelle legend. Better to have me deep down below the surface, where no one would expect to find a Mirambelle. Better to have me hidden in the Gallimaufries.”

“But you didn’t stay there. You got out.”

“I did. No thanks to the Mirambelle clan, though.” This was the place to stop. This was where he ought to say no more. Bony went on. “I got out because of something else. When I was thirteen years old I became interested in remote viewing, and I heard about something that the Duke of Bosny had been doing. I wanted to take a look.”

“What was it?”

“I’d rather not say.” There was a long silence, then Bony continued, “He was, well, you know, fooling around in unusual ways. Doing things I wasn’t sure were even physically possible. So I figured out how to make the equipment, and I built it, and I did the remote viewing. I wanted to see. I mean, I was only thirteen.”

Now she was staring at him in a peculiar way. His instinct had been right, he should have stopped with the Mirambelles.

Liddy said, “Bony, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. And you probably don’t need to. Anything you’ve seen or heard about, I probably did . Oh dear. Now I’ve shocked you.”

“No, no. I’ve — been around.”

“I was at the Leah Rainbow Academy, you know.”

“Yes. Yes. The Leah Rainbow Academy. The Academy.”

“Bony, stop gibbering. Forget the Academy. I lived through it, so can you. You did the remote viewing. Tell me what happened next.”

“I got caught. I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, and I had no idea how many levels of security there were around the Duke of Bosny. A man called Chan Dalton came to see me.”

“Chan Dalton! He’s a big wheel. He’s the Duke’s chief enforcer.”

“He is now. But this was twenty years ago. He had some connection with the Duke that he didn’t specify, and he had all kinds of weapons in his belt. I felt sure he’d come to kill me. He told me he wanted to know how I’d broken in, because the Duke’s experts told him that remote viewing access to the inner court was impossible. He made me do it again, with him actually present, to prove that I could.”

“And then he killed you.”

“No. Then he recruited me. Not to the Duke of Bosny’s service, but for a project of his own. He told me he was putting a specialized team together to go to the stars. He believed that the other freelance expeditions were doing everything wrong, and he knew better. His team was almost assembled, and an inventor and tinkerer like me was the final component. If I could learn what was needed, I was in. Otherwise, it would be back to Earth and the Gallimaufries. He sent me away to a little planetoid called Horus, and tried to give me a proper education. It didn’t work out too well. Turned out I had to learn things my own way, or not at all.”

“But you must have learned. You didn’t go back to Earth.”

“There were other reasons for that. Just before I finished on Horus and found out whether I was in or out, news came back from Mercantor about the Guljee Expedition, with all the killings. The other Stellar Group members decided it was the final proof that humans were too bloody-minded to wander free around the stars. Right after that they put the quarantine in place. Chan Dalton had to disband the team. We all went our separate ways. He gave me my freedom, and enough money to start another life. I kept in touch with the other team members for a long time, but when the quarantine went on and on we drifted apart and lost contact. With the road to the stars closed, there was no point in thinking of ourselves as a team. It was a depressing period for everybody. But you’re too young to remember it.”

“No I’m not. One of my first memories was the big news that none of the Link access points were working.”

“Not quite that. We could go anywhere within the extended solar system. But nothing beyond a lightyear.”

“Surely the Geyser Swirl is more than that. We’re a lot more than a lightyear from the Sun.”

“More than a hundred lightyears. That’s one of the mysteries we came here to solve: Why is there a Link access point open to humans? Well, we’re here, and no closer to finding out.” Bony waved his arm around at their barren surroundings. They had been walking steadily as they talked, and had reached the top of a sharp-edged ridge. The black rock showed signs of weathering by wind and rain, but nowhere in all the expanse of hills and valleys ahead could the eye find any sign of a living thing. The sun was lower in the sky, and soon it would be time to turn back.

“In fact,” Bony went on, “we have other mysteries. How could we come through a Link and arrive in the middle of the sea? Our mass detector is supposed to inhibit a Link transit when there’s matter at the other end.”

He was talking too much, and more to himself than to Liddy. He was surprised to hear her say, “And now there’s one more mystery to explain.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you said there was no life on land, and I assume that included birds.” Liddy was pointing off to the left. “But isn’t that a bird?”

Bony followed her arm and at first could see nothing. Then he caught the dark moving point in the sky. A bird.

So there were birds, or at least some kind of flying animal. He had been wrong about that, and he must be just as wrong about life on land. Surely a flying form couldn’t evolve directly from a sea-creature without a land form in between.

The moving dot was larger, drifting across the sky on a slanting course that would cross their own path far ahead of them. Bony stared hard, trying to make out details of the flying shape.

“I see a tail behind the main lobes,” Liddy said. Her eyes must be sharper than his. “And a line of little dots on the side of the body. I think — yes, it’s turning. There are wings. But—”

Bony could see them, too. The moving shape was banking. As it did so, the profile as seen from below was revealed. It was the same triple-lobe winged form that had cast its shadow on Bony when he was on the seabed. And something else. The sun was at their back, and the sunlight catching the underside of the object turned it to a silvery gleam.

“That’s reflection from metal,” Liddy said excitedly. “It’s a ship!”

“It is. And it’s big . Those `little dots’ you see on the side are ports. But how can it fly, with a shape like that? It seems to just hang in the air.” Bony grabbed Liddy’s arm. “Come on. It will be getting dark in another hour or two and we don’t want to find ourselves wandering around the sea at night. We have to get back to the Mood Indigo and tell Friday what we’ve learned.”

Liddy gave him a questioning look, but she turned at once and allowed him to lead her back the way that they had come. She didn’t say anything, but Bony suspected that she knew the real reason he wanted to return to their ship. It had nothing to do with their responsibility to report everything they found to the official leader of the expedition, Friday Indigo. It was the fact that the outline of the ship they had just seen did not resemble any design in use by humans or other species of the Stellar Group. It was not the product of Tinkers, Pipe-Rillas, or Angels. The ship they had seen wasn’t just alien, it was alien alien.

Bony had a sudden suspicion that the land surface of Limbo might offer greater dangers than the depths of its oceans.