The Spheres of Heaven

27: ON BOARD THE HERO’S RETURN

“Nine, eight, so seven’s next. Or did I do seven already?”

Bony was muttering to himself, counting hull partitions as he crawled past them.

He had already seen more than enough partitions. The Hero’s Return was divided along its entire length into twenty-meter segments, each separated from its neighbors by bulkheads strong enough to allow vacuum on either side. That was all very well for a cruiser in space, where during a battle any section might be breached by enemy weapons; but when you were down on the seabed of an alien planet, with vacuum a longed-for memory, partitions were nothing more than a nuisance with sealed hatches to be negotiated at each one.

Water was seeping into the ship, slowly but steadily, and Bony wanted to know where it came from. The ship’s external sensors were no longer working, which meant he had to examine the condition of the outer and inner hulls for himself. That involved crawling the length of the ship and looking for water in the space between the hulls.

He had begun without a suit, and learned by the fourth segment that was a mistake. The Hero’s Return did not have a bilge like a seagoing vessel, but in a gravity field everything seeped down to pool in the curved space between the inner and outer hulls. As he passed the third bulkhead he had skidded into — and fallen down in — a revolting mixture of oil, water, and slick ooze. He went back and put his suit on, but it was already too late. His face and body were coated with black glop, and sweating inside the suit only made things worse.

“Six — or is it five?” Bony crawled grimly on, oily water covering him to shoulder level and casting rainbow reflections from the light in his suit’s helmet. Never before had he realized the true size of a Class Five cruiser. But now he was far past the ship’s midpoint, and the curve of the hull was upward. Another couple of sections and he should have ascended until he was above the water level.

That was small comfort. His journey along the lowest level had convinced him that the Hero’s Return was dying, and far faster than the ship’s computer was willing to admit. Jettisoning the defensive shields had been necessary for the ship’s immediate survival when they arrived in the ocean of Limbo, but the same act had guaranteed long-term and irreversible failures.

He reached the last two sections, and discovered worse news. On the ship’s arrival on Limbo its forward motion had finally been halted by an underwater ledge. Even at a speed of a few meters a second, the impact of the ship’s bow with unyielding rock had buckled and twisted the outer and inner hulls and mashed them into each other. Worse than the damage to the hull was the destruction of the vital navigational instruments mounted at the bows. The Hero’s Return would be ready for another trip to space only after major refurbishing had been performed; which, in practice, meant never.

Bony made his final assessment as he clambered up a tight spiral staircase leading to one of the main corridors, and from there headed for what had once been the fire control room. It was the most likely place to find Chan Dalton and Dag Korin and give them his report. Bony’s message would be a grim one: the ship could not be used for a Link transition, and it would become totally uninhabitable in a few days.

Chan and the General were not in the control room. Tully O’Toole and Liddy Morse were; also — a surprise to Bony — the Angel, Gressel, immobile and apparently asleep on a broad-based pot of black earth, while next to it Elke Siry sat at a terminal frowning and grimacing and biting her lips. She was hammering a keypad at a furious rate. Tully O’Toole and Liddy Morse hovered by, apparently urging her on.

Bony opened the visor of his helmet and sank down into a seat next to them. His suit was covered with sticky ooze, but he was too bushed to care. Even though the onboard robots were close to imbecility, a simple cleaning job should not be beyond them.

“Well?” Liddy came closer, but she did not try to touch him. He could hardly blame her. But she knew where he had been, and what he had been doing.

“I give us three days, if we push everything to the limit.”

Elke had frowned in irritation when Liddy first spoke, but at Bony’s words she spun around in her chair. “Three days for what?”

“Three days until we’re forced to abandon the Hero’s Return and try our luck ashore. This ship is dying around us.” Bony’s wave took in the tilted floor, sweating ceiling, and fading wall lights. “It’s on its last legs. Any word from Deb and the others while I’ve been below? They’ve been gone nearly ten hours, and it must be getting dark up there.”

Tully shook his head. “Nothing. But that’s not so strange, because Chan doesn’t want radio signals until we know more about whatever destroyed our orbiters. We’ll hear from the shore party when they come back and report, not before. Let’s hope they make it fast, ’cause this old ship won’t last.”

“Three days,” Elke said. “Damnation. Just when this is getting really interesting.” That wasn’t the word that Bony would have chosen, but Elke went on, “We’re making great progress mapping the multiverse, and we have some guesses about the way the new Link might work; but I can’t continue the analysis without a computer.”

Liddy looked at Bony. “I suppose we can’t take it ashore with us?”

“The computer? Not a chance. It’s a distributed system with elements scattered all the way through the ship. It would be easier to take the power plant, and that weighs three hundred tons.”

Gressel showed sudden signs of life, rippling its fronds from top to bottom. “Computer,” the Angel said in a deep, dreamy voice. “Hmmm, computer. Yes, a computer is indeed useful in defining the Link transition that a homebound ship must make. But that abstract problem, despite Dr. Siry’s modesty, is close to being solved, and our own internal computational power should suffice to handle the remainder. Of far more concern, we suggest, is the absence of a ship that can make the Link transition. Recall the human recipe for making a rabbit pie: First catch your rabbit. Accepting what Mr. Rombelle tells us, we ask: Where is our ship?”

“The aliens on shore have a ship, and more,” Tully said.

“But will they make one available to us?”

“Well, if they don’t and if they won’t, we’ll—”

“Do not continue with that thought.” The Angel’s voice deepened. “Remember, violence is never the answer. There are always peaceful solutions. We will not pursue that subject. Instead, we suggest that a summary of our current state of knowledge is in order. Dr. Siry, would you like to proceed?”

“You could do it better than I.”

“How true. But this is to an audience of humans , with its own curious cultural referents.” Gressel waved a succulent side frond. “Horses for courses. Better, we think, if you offer the summary.”

“We-e-ll …” Elke sighed, but as she turned to face the others she did not seem displeased. “The amazing thing about the multiverse is not that we’ve discovered its existence. It’s that we’ve been blind to it for so long while it was staring us in the face. We’ve used the Links to make interstellar jumps for — how long?” No one spoke. “Well, hundreds of years at least. All that time, theorists have argued that the only way you can go somewhere through a Link is by passing through an intermediate space, one that’s connected differently from our own spacetime. Points that are widely separated in our universe are close together in the other one.”

“But I thought that `other universe’ was just sort of a mental picture,” Liddy objected. “Just a way of visualizing things.”

“If it were just a picture, how could it work?” Elke’s blue eyes were sparkling and she displayed more passion than anyone on the Hero’s Return had ever seen. “No, this is a real alternate universe — it has to be, because we travel through it. Our mistake was in thinking that there was one alternate universe, and it was the only possible alternate universe. What Gressel and I have discovered is a large number — possibly an infinite number — of other universes, all just as real as the one we came from, or the one we’re in here on Limbo. And we’re finding out a lot of things about them. For instance, there are universes in which all the basic physical constants are widely different from what we’re used to. A transition to one of them would be fatal, because nothing like us could survive. We were lucky. This universe and ours are very close in properties. We know that, because we’re alive. Also, the universe that the land aliens came from, no matter how alien it may be in other ways, must also be close in its physical constants. Otherwise they couldn’t survive here, either.”

Tully asked, “How do you know they’re not from our universe?”

He had moved closer when Elke began to speak, and now to his amazement she reached forward and placed her hand on his arm. “The nature of the Link tells us that! It’s completely different from what we’re used to, different from anything we’ve imagined. For one thing, it’s on an air-water boundary, which before we came here I would have said was impossible. For another, if the Link had been present in the Geyser Swirl for years, the Stellar Group aliens would have found it. But the Angel and I are beginning to understand it, and how everything works.”

She finally realized that she was touching Tully and pulled her hand away. “It’s all right,” he said, but she turned quickly to the display controls and went on, “See, we’re starting to map the structure of the multiverse. It contains a whole spectrum of energy levels. Just knowing that those exist is half the battle. I’ve made a diagram of what I’ve been calling `uphill’ and `downhill’ universes. Here it is.” The screen showed a set of nodes connected by a complicated network of lines. “The yellow arrows are to places that call for a greater energy expenditure to reach them, the blue to ones that you can reach more easily. The aliens who made the Link here on Limbo probably came uphill, because the ships we’ve seen from orbit don’t seem to have huge power units. They’ll find it easier to go home than they did to come here. We think the same is true of us. We’ll go home” — she ignored Bony’s murmured If we go home — “easier than we came, because the power drain getting to this place was enormous, much bigger than it usually is for a single transition.” She paused in annoyance. A buzzing tone like a giant bee was ringing through the ship, interrupting her final words. “What on earth is that?”

“Main airlock, with an emergency signal that’s not working quite right. Like everything else around here.” Bony stood up. “It must the shore party, returning to the ship. Come on.”

He led the rush out of the control room. After a few seconds of hesitation Elke and Tully followed, leaving the Angel to fend for itself.

“I didn’t get to tell them the most interesting part of all,” Elke complained to Tully as they went. “Every universe runs at its own individual clock rate. For instance, as the Angel pointed out, time passes in this world more than sixty times as fast as on Earth. If we’re here for another two days, four months will elapse for people back home. But it could be a lot worse. Gressel estimates from the structure of the multiverse that some places run a million times as fast. If we stayed in a place like that for just a week, twenty thousand years would pass back on Earth. That’s longer than the whole of human recorded history. We’re mapping multiverse coordinates so we can be sure to avoid places like that.”

Elke paused. Even she, swept away by her enthusiasm for science, realized that Tully was not listening. He was pretending to, but he was staring ahead in anticipation as they came closer to the airlock. Chan Dalton and Dag Korin had appeared from nowhere, and the General was bustling along as fast as anyone and cursing his aged legs. Bony, still muck-splattered and grimy, earned only a raised eyebrow.

“Not too close,” Chan snapped when they were at the lock. He spread his arms to keep the others away from the hatch. “I hope I know who’s coming out of there, but we can’t be sure.”

It was a new and disturbing thought. Everyone but Dag Korin took a pace back. The lock seemed to be cycling slower than usual, and the tension was huge until at last the hatch slid open and Danny Casement stepped out.

Stepped was perhaps the wrong word. He staggered forward, sagged against Chan, and allowed himself to be supported. When he saw the waiting group he reached up and wearily opened his suit’s visor. “I made it, but I’m on my last legs.” He jerked his head back toward the lock’s interior. “She’s in bad shape.”

“Deb!” Chan released his hold on Danny and jumped forward. But there was no sign of Deb Bisson inside the lock. All it held was the giant form of Vow-of-Silence, her pipe-stem body tightly curled and her spindly limbs wrapped tight around it.

“What happened?” Chan was reaching down to lift the Pipe-Rilla, but her body remained rigidly knotted.

“Long story.” Danny was sitting on the floor, taking deep breaths. “I’ll tell you everything when I can sit down and have a drink — a strong one. Short version: we saw Chrissie and Tarbush cut down right in front of our eyes.”

“Chrissie and the Tarb have been murdered ?”

“I’m not sure. Either murdered, or they’re hostages. They went closer to the alien camp than they were supposed to, and they were spotted. They tried to run, but the land aliens pointed some kind of gun at them and they went down. I’d have said they were dead, except that there was another human in the encampment. It had to be Friday Indigo, from the Mood Indigo , and he was walking around free.” Danny slowly rose to his feet. “So I’m hoping that Chrissie and the Tarb are alive. But you know how the Stellar Group feels about violence. When it looked like two of our party were killed, Vow-of-Silence went over the edge into some kind of catatonic state. Deb and I couldn’t get her out of it.” Danny glanced at the Pipe-Rilla, unconscious in Chan Dalton’s grip. “Don’t ever tell me again that it’s easier to move things underwater. I dragged and carried her on land and sea for five hours, and the last part was the hardest.”

“But where’s Deb?”

“Still ashore. I wanted her to come with me, but she wouldn’t. She said that she couldn’t desert Chrissie and Tarb, and she was also waiting to see if the Tinker Composite showed up. Eager Seeker scattered all over the place. When I left not a single component had come back.”

“Look after Vow-of-Silence.” Chan placed the Pipe-Rilla on the floor. “I’m going after Deb.”

“The hell you are.” Dag Korin moved to block the entrance to the lock. “We’ve lost two already — maybe three. I know how you feel about Deb Bisson, but common sense trumps emotion. It’s night up there. You stay here until morning. Then we’ll review the situation.”

“You expect me to sit and do nothing?”

“No. I expect you to listen to what Dan Casement has to say, and then sleep. If you can’t sleep, you sit and think. I need brains, not martyrs. Now, the rest of you.” Korin turned to the others in the group to emphasize that he was not going to listen to any more argument from Chan. “We’ll have a full debriefing on shore party activities in my quarters. Don’t worry, Casement, you’ll get your drink there — I’ll guarantee it.” Korin frowned at the group. “We’re one missing. Where’s the Angel?”

“In the control room,” Elke said. “We were in such a hurry to get here, we left Gressel behind.”

Korin hesitated. “I’m tempted to say, let’s leave Gressel right out of things for the moment. But if we do, Casement will have to do his debriefing all over again later on, and I’m not sure what to do about her.” He pointed a gnarled finger at Vow-of-Silence, still tight-curled and motionless on the floor. “Oh, all right. Rombelle and Morse, you go get the Angel and bring it to my quarters. Dalton, give me a hand with the Pipe-Rilla. I don’t know a thing about alien physiology, but the ship’s computer should. We’ll drop her off in the med center and hope the unit can give her treatment. Dr. Siry, I’d like a summary of what you and the Angel have found out since last we talked, and you can give me that while we deal with Vow-of-Silence.”

“What about me?” Danny said, as Bony and Liddy hurried away to the control room and Chan hoisted Vow-of-Silence to waist level, so Dag Korin could grab the long, curved abdomen.

The General stared at him. “You save your strength and put your thoughts in order. Before any drink goes to your head, I need you to tell us every last thing that happened before you went ashore and after you arrived there. I’d like to know what the land looks like, feels like, and smells like. Describe the plants and animals. Describe the encampment. Describe the aliens. Describe the human you saw, if you saw him. Describe anything and describe everything.” Korin took his share of the load of Vow-of-Silence, and grunted at the weight. “You carried her back here all alone? Then you deserve to drink the ship dry if you feel like it. But you won’t see a drop until the rest of us know as much about life ashore as you do.”

Danny did his best. What he would really have liked was a long, strong drink immediately followed by a long, deep sleep, but he recognized his responsibility and tried to make sure that the others learned everything he had seen, heard, thought, and suspected during his day ashore.

The Angel didn’t make his job any easier. Bony Rombelle and Liddy Morse had trundled it in on an improvised trolley, and either its desertion in the control room or the rough journey along the ship’s corridors was not to its liking. For the first few minutes, Gressel sat hunched as far down in the pot of earth as possible, fronds folded. And when the Angel finally began to open and take notice and even interrupt, there was a sideways jump to its logic that left Danny blinking.

“At what exact local time of day was it when you emerged from the sea?” the Angel asked, as Danny was busy trying to give every detail of their arrival ashore.

“I’m not sure. Why do you want to know?”

“We wish to develop an exact chronology of all events affecting the shore party.”

“Well, I can’t tell you to better than an hour.”

“His suit will tell us,” Bony said. “The thermal balance would change as he came out of the water and into air, and that will be recorded against a time line.”

“Look into it later.” Chan was impatient to move on to the meeting with the land aliens. “What next, Danny, after the group reached the shelter of the vegetation?”

“We would like to have removed our suits, for comfort, but there were too many unfamiliar critters around. And we didn’t want to go crawling through the jungle for the same reason. A few of the Tinker components had already gone winging off over the top of the plants, and they all vanished. So we took the gadget that Bony made, and we gave it to Vow-of-Silence, and—”

Danny wanted to describe what the Pipe-Rilla had seen through the periscope, but Gressel was in first. The Angel clapped top fronds together loudly to gain attention, and interrupted. “Exactly how many Tinker components flew away?”

Another off-the-wall question. Danny was exhausted, he still didn’t have his drink, and he found it hard enough to provide a clear version of events without stupid interruptions. “How many components? I’m not sure. There were bits and pieces of Tinker coming and going all the time. What difference does it make?”

“Perhaps none. Perhaps the number will prove of great significance.” The Angel sank down into silence.

Danny waited, but apparently no more explanation was forthcoming.

“The periscope,” Chan prompted.

“It wasn’t long enough for anyone else to see over the ridge,” Danny went on. “But Vow-of-Silence was so tall, she could do it. Here’s what she saw — or said she saw. Remember now, none of the rest of us had anything to go on except what was told to us.”

He summarized what he and the others hidden in the scrub had heard about the encampment, and the aliens, and the form wandering around free that looked like a human.

“Looked to a Pipe-Rilla like a human,” Dag Korin said. “But damn it, do you think some gooky misfit lengths of animated drainpipe could look through a shaky handheld periscope, and be sure she was looking at a person a kilometer or more away?”

The Angel stirred, but Danny could recognize a rhetorical question when he heard one.

“We wanted to confirm what Vow-of-Silence had seen,” he said, “so we decided — after a bit of argument — that Chrissie and the Tarb should go take a closer look-see.”

“What argument?” Dag Korin said. “I want to hear about that, too. Don’t decide for yourself that something isn’t important, and leave it out. Let’s hear the lot.”

Danny sighed. Did they really want to know about the dark-red wriggly thing that he had found on the purple fern? Did they want to hear about Scruffy, and the hassle Deb had given Tarbush about taking the ferret with him? At some point he knew what they were going to say. Other than bugs and plants and soil, he hadn’t seen a single blessed thing. Everything that he knew about the encampment, about Friday Indigo, and about the mowing down of Chrissie and Tarbush had come to him secondhand as a report from either Deb or the Pipe-Rilla. They had seen and spoken, he had listened. He was a mere conveyor of hearsay.

It was easiest to make no judgment, reorganize no facts, and simply offer a stream-of-consciousness version of events. Let the listener decide what was important.

He described, through Vow-of-Silence’s eyes, the appearance of something that looked like a human which had apparently persuaded Chrissie and the Tarb to move forward when they ought to have retreated. The approach as far as the encampment’s guarding fence. The emergence of three dark-shelled and fast-moving shapes. The run for cover — the raised black canes — the fall, to lie motionless on the bare ground.

And now, at last, something to which he could personally attest: the high-pitched, eerie moan that had emerged from Vow-of-Silence’s narrow head. The final dispersal of Eager Seeker into a great cloud of components, circling Danny and the rigid Pipe-Rilla like a tornado before flying off in all directions. And, five seconds later, Vow-of-Silence’s collapse forward at Danny’s side, into a fit or trance from which neither he nor Deb had been able to wake her.

“I ask again.” the Angel interrupted Danny’s reliving of the moment. “How many components had Eager Seeker lost, in total, prior to this dispersal? Lost from every cause?”

“Does it matter?” Dag Korin made no attempt to hide his irritation with Gressel. “What difference does it make if a hundred or a thousand Tinker components flew away?”

Danny was glad to see somebody else fencing with the Angel. He no longer had the strength — he was so tired he could barely follow Gressel’s questions, never mind answer them.

“It’s because of Tinker size and Tinker structure,” Chan said suddenly. “I remember it from twenty years ago, when I was working with a Tinker Composite on Travancore. I never saw the effect myself, but isn’t there some kind of Tinker stress/stability relation?”

“There is indeed.” The Angel produced from its speech synthesizer a sigh very like a human’s. “As a Tinker Composite grows in size, it also grows in intelligence. That is well-known. What is less commonly known is that with increased intelligence comes greater sophistication in handling threats to a Tinker’s own safety. Unfortunately, the converse holds true. Reduce the number of components and the Composite decreases in stability. Now, as I understand it, Eager Seeker was originally an unusually large Composite. But soon after arrival on Limbo, a substantial fraction was detached to form Blessed Union, and went ashore.”

“That’s what I was told,” Bony said, then felt embarrassed because he had butted in. He muttered, “But it never came back.”

“And Eager Seeker went at that point from being a large to a somewhat small Composite. Yet more components were lost when the shore party was exploring. A reduced Composite, subjected to unexpected stresses at such a time, seeks safety using a mechanism ingrained through all of Tinker evolution: solitation.”

“It flies apart,” Chan said softly. “Disperses.”

“Worse than that. A Tinker can normally disperse at any time, and then reassemble. But a Tinker who suffers solitation will never come together again as an ensemble without assistance. The components eat, and they can still breed. But they form an uncoupled host of mindless and solitary components.” The Angel stirred, as though the sentient crystalline Singer within the vegetable of the Chassel-Rose imagined its own irrevocable separation of parts.

“It’s death for the Composite,” Liddy said. She clutched Bony’s hand. “It may not sound like it, but it is.”

“Which means that Deb is alone on shore.” Chan looked at Dag Korin. “She was waiting for Eager Seeker to come back, but it’s not going to happen. And while she waits there she’s a sitting target for whatever got Chrissie and Tarbush.”

“No.” The General shook his head. “I know where you’re heading with your thinking, Dalton, but I won’t allow it.”

“I could go solo. Danny’s back, and the ship is safe.”

“Not a chance. It would be crazy for you to try, at night and in unexplored terrain. Deb Bisson is a smart woman, too smart to do anything stupid. She won’t risk anything at night. She’ll lie low until morning. Then like as not she’ll decide that she can’t wait any longer for Eager Seeker, and head back here.”

“I think I ought to go.”

“And I’m pulling rank and telling you, for the last time, you’re not going. Get a grip, man.” Korin stood up, went to the metal bureau in the corner of the room, and opened the doors. “Casement wants a drink, and you should have one, too. We all should. Come on, Dalton, relax. We’re all here, and Deb Bisson is safe ashore. Not a damn thing is going to happen, here or there, until morning.”

Korin picked up a bottle, opened it, and began to pour Santory single-malt whiskey into a line of small rounded glasses.

As he did so, a loud buzzing drone rang through the whole ship. Once again it signaled for emergency action. Something, it said, was in the main airlock of the Hero’s Return.