Transcendence

Chapter Twenty-One

Hans Rebka glared at the image of the Erebus in the forward display screens. The appearance of the ship suggested a derelict hulk, abandoned for millennia. The vast hull was pitted by impact with interstellar dust grains. Observation ports, their transparent walls scuffed by the same microsand, bulged from the ship’s sides like rheumy old eyes fogged by cataracts.

And for all the response to Rebka’s signals, the Erebus might as well be dead! He had fired off a dozen urgent inquiries as the Indulgence rose to orbital rendezvous. Why was there an emergency distress signal? What was the nature of the problem? Was it safe for the Indulgence to dock and enter the cargo hold? No reply. The ship above them drifted alone in space like a great dead beast, silent and unresponsive to any stimulus.

“Take us in.” Rebka hated to go into anything blind, but there was no choice.

Kallik nodded, and her paws skipped across the controls too fast to see. The rendezvous maneuver of scoutship and Erebus was executed at record speed and far more smoothly than Rebka could have done it himself. Within minutes they were at the entrance of the subsidiary cargo hold.

“Hold us there.” As the Indulgence hovered stationary with respect to the other ship and the pumps filled the hold with air, Rebka scanned the screens. Still nothing. No sign of danger — but also no one awaiting their return and warping them into the dock. That was odd. Whatever had happened, the Erebus, everyone’s way home, should not have been left deserted.

He turned to order the hatch opened, but others were ahead of him. Nenda and Atvar H’sial had given the command as soon as pressures equalized, and already they were floating out toward the corridor that led to the control room of the Erebus. Rebka followed, leaving Kallik to turn the scoutship in case they had to make a rapid departure.

The first corridors were deserted, but that meant nothing. The inside of the Erebus was so big that even with a thousand people on board it could appear empty. The key question was the state of the control room. That was the nerve center of the ship. It should always have someone on duty.

And in a manner of speaking it did. Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial had hurried far ahead of Rebka. When he arrived at the control room he found them at the main console, leaning over the crouched figure of Julian Graves. The councilor was hunched far down with the palms of his hands covering his eyes. His long, skinny fingers reached up over his bulging forehead. Rebka assumed that Graves was unconscious, but then he realized that Louis Nenda was speaking softly to him. As Rebka approached, Graves slowly withdrew his hands and crossed them on his chest. The face revealed was in constant movement. The expression changed moment to moment from thought to fear to worry.

“We’ll take care of you,” Nenda was saying. “Just relax an’ try an’ tell me what’s wrong. What happened?”

Julian Graves showed a flash of a smile, then his mouth opened. “I don’t know. I — we — can’t think. Too much to think.”

His mouth snapped closed with a click of teeth. The head turned away, to gaze vaguely around the room.

“Too much what?” Nenda moved so that Graves could not avoid looking at him.

The misty gray eyes rolled. “Too much — too much me.”

Nenda stared at Hans Rebka. “That’s what he said before. ‘Too much me.’ D’you know what he’s gettin’ at?”

“No idea. But I can see why the distress signal is going out. If he’s on duty, he’s certainly not able to control the ship. Look at him.”

Graves had returned to his crouched position and was muttering to himself. “Go lower, survey landing site. No, must remain high, safe there. No, return through singularities, wait there. No, must leave Anfract.” With every broken sentence his facial expressions changed, writhing from decision to uncertainty to mind-blanking worry.

Rebka had a sudden insight. Graves was torn by diverging thoughts — exactly as though the integration of Julius Graves and his interior mnemonic twin Steven to form the single personality of Julian Graves had failed. The old conflict of the two consciousnesses in one brain had returned.

But that idea was soon overwhelmed in Rebka’s own mind by another and more pressing concern.

“Why is he on duty alone? It must be obvious to the others that he’s not fit to make decisions.” He bent over, took Julian Graves’s head between his hands, and turned it so that he could stare right into the councilor’s eyes. “Councilor Graves, listen to me. I have a very important question. Where are the others?”

“Others.” Graves muttered the word. His eyes flickered and his lips trembled. He nodded. He understood, Rebka was sure he did, but he seemed unable to force an answer.

“The others,” Rebka repeated. “Who else is on board the Erebus?”

Graves began to twitch, while the tendons stood out in his thin neck. He was gathering himself for some supreme effort. His lips pressed tightly together and then opened with a gasp.

“The only other — on board the Erebus is — is J’merlia.”

Rebka, tensed to receive a disturbing answer, released Graves’s head and grunted in disappointment. Graves did not know it, but he had given the one reply that proved he was no longer rational. J’merlia was dead. Rebka had seen him die with his own eyes. Of all the people who had entered the Anfract, J’merlia was the only one who absolutely could not be on board the Erebus.

“That does it.” Rebka moved to stand at Graves’s side. “Poor devil. Let’s get him where he can rest and give him a sedative. He needs medical help, but the only people who can give it are the ones who installed the interior mnemonic twin. They’re back on Miranda, a thousand light-years away. I don’t know what treatment to give him. As for the others on board, when I find ’em I’ll skin them all. There’s no way they should have left him here alone — even if he was nominally in command.”

Rebka moved to one side of Graves and gestured to Louis Nenda to take the man’s other arm. The councilor glanced from one to the other in bewilderment as they lifted him. He offered no resistance, but he could not have walked without them. His muscles had plenty of strength, but his legs did not seem to know in which direction they were supposed to move. Rebka and Nenda eased out of the door. Atvar H’sial stayed in the control room — first rule of space, never leave the ship’s bridge with no one in charge.

They took Graves to the sick bay, where Rebka placed him under medium-level sedation — he already seemed only half-conscious — and swathed him in protective webbing.

“Won’t help him much, but at least he can’t get into trouble here,” Rebka said. He tied the straps in a complex pattern. “And if he’s together enough to figure out these knots, then he’s thinking a whole lot better than he was when we brought him here.”

The two men started back toward the bridge. They were at the final branch of the corridor when they heard the click of Kallik’s steps from the other direction.

“Did you turn the Indulgence?” Rebka asked without looking at the Hymenopt. Instead of a reply in human speech, Kallik produced a high-pitched whistle and an unintelligible burst of Hymenopt clicks. Louis Nenda at once jumped to Kallik’s side. He picked up the little Hymenopt and shook her.

“What are you up to?” Rebka backed away. One just did not do that to a Hymenopt! Anyone but Louis Nenda who tried it on Kallik would face rapid death. Kallik’s short black fur — the hymantel, so prized by unwise bounty hunters — was bristling, and the yellow sting had involuntarily slipped out a couple of inches from the lower end of the stubby abdomen.

Nenda was unworried. “Hafta do it. She’s in shock, see. Gotta bring her out of it.” He banged the Hymenopt hard on top of her smooth round head with his clenched fist and unleashed a burst of clucking whistles. “I’m tellin’ her to speak human — that oughta help. She don’t know how to moan an’ groan in that. Come on, Kallik, tell me. Whatsamatter?”

“I turned the s-sh-ship.” Kallik spoke, but slowly and badly. She had regressed, back to the time when human speech had been new to her.

“Yeah. Then what?”

“I left the c-cargo hold. I began to move along the corridor. And then — then—”

“Get on with it!”

“Then—” The sting had retracted, but now the little body was shaking in Nenda’s arms. “Then I saw J’merlia. S-standing in front of me. In the corridor that led to the control room.”

“Kallik, you know that can’t be. J’merlia’s dead — you saw it happen.” But Louis Nenda’s eyes told a different story. He and Rebka exchanged looks. Impossible? Maybe. But from two quite independent sources?

“It was J’merlia. There could be no mistake. It was his voice, as well as his appearance.” Kallik was steadying. She was a supremely logical being, and any offense to logic was especially troubling to her. But the explanation in human speech was restoring her natural modes of thought. “He was about twenty meters away from me, farther along this same corridor. He called out my name, and then he spoke to me. He told me that I must go at once to the control room, that Julian Graves was in need of help.” Kallik paused and stared at Rebka. “That is true, isn’t it? And then, while I was looking straight at J’merlia…”

She stopped speaking. Every eye in her whole black circle of eyes dimmed and seemed to go out of focus at once. Nenda banged her down hard on the floor.

“Don’t you go brain-dead on me again. Spit it out, Kallik. Right now, or I’ll scatter your guts all round the room.”

Kallik shook her head. “I will say it, Master Nenda, as you command. But it is not possible. While I was staring at him, J’merlia vanished. He did not move, for I am faster than he and I would have seen and tracked any movement that he could make. I did not lose consciousness, either, not even for a moment, which was my first thought, because I was in midair, jumping toward him when he vanished. It could not be some trick of reflection, or some peculiar optical effect, because less than a second after he disappeared I stood in the spot where he had stood, and felt the difference in temperature of the floor where his legs had rested.” Kallik slumped down, all her own legs wide. “It was truly he. My friend J’merlia.”

Rebka and Nenda stared at each other.

“She’s not lying, you know,” Nenda muttered. He was talking more to himself than to Hans Rebka.

“I know. That’s what I was afraid of. It would be a lot easier if she were.” Rebka forced himself away from snarling impossibilities and back to things he knew how to handle. “You realize that’s exactly what he said.” He jerked his thumb back toward the sick bay where Julian Graves lay. “According to him, J’merlia was the only one with him on the Erebus.”

“Yeah. But we don’t have to believe that. We can check who’s here. At can sniff the central air supply, an’ if there’s anybody else on the ship she’ll get a trace of ’em. Hold a minute.” Nenda hurried off, back toward the control room.

Neither man needed to spell out the rest: If no one but Graves and J’merlia had been on the ship, then where were Darya and the others? Almost certainly, on Genizee. Which meant that the ascent of the Indulgence had stranded them there.

Hans Rebka did not wait for Nenda’s return. “Bring Master Nenda to the Indulgence as soon as he gets back from the control room,” he said. He did not ask Kallik, who was still splayed on the floor — he commanded her. He hated to treat her as a slave, when he had argued so strongly that she was not; but this was a time, if ever, when the ends justified the means. The Hymenopt simply nodded obedience, and Rebka went hurrying back to the scoutship.

Kallik had done her job in the cargo hold. The Indulgence was waiting, power recharged and command sequences set, ready to return to space. Rebka went to the open hatch. He itched to fly straight out of the hold and back to the surface of Genizee, but first he had to be sure of the situation on board the Erebus.

When Louis Nenda returned he was not alone. Atvar H’sial was right behind him, gliding through the corridors in twenty-meter leaps.

“No worries,” Nenda said, in answer to Rebka’s unasked question. “Kallik’s keeping an eye out on the bridge. She’s actin’ up some ways, but she’ll be okay for a couple of minutes.”

“What does Atvar H’sial say?”

“Agrees with Julian Graves, and with Kallik. Not a sniff of anyone else on board — ’cept for J’merlia. An’ that one’s fading, At says, like he was here an’ then just left. Downright spooky. If I were the worryin’ kind, that’d be heavy on my mind.” Nenda had moved past Rebka through the open hatch of the Indulgence, and was examining the controls. “You ready, then?”

“Ready?”

“Ready to head back down to Genizee.”

“I am. But you’re not going.”

“You wanna bet on it? I’m goin’, or you got a big fight on your hands.”

Rebka opened his mouth to protest and then changed his mind. If Nenda wanted danger, why stop him? He was a liar and self-serving crook, but he was also an extra brain and an extra pair of hands — and he was a proven survivor. “Fine. Get in, and hurry up. We’re going now.”

But the Karelian human was glancing over his shoulder to the hulking figure of Atvar H’sial, poised behind Hans Rebka at the hatch. “Uh-oh. Get set for takeoff, Captain, but before we go I gotta have a quick word with At there an’ tell her what’s what.”

“Louis Nenda.” The Cecropian’s pheromonal message was strong as he approached her, the overtones full of suspicion and possible reproach. “I can read you clearly. We are safe in space, but you propose to return to the planet Genizee. Explain your actions… or lose a partner.”

“Explain. There’s nothin’ needs explainin’,” Nenda came close to the Cecropian and crouched under her dark-red body case. “Be reasonable, At. Rebka’s goin’, you see that, whether I do or not. We know there’s all sorts of goodies down there, an’ we know he’s too dumb to take ’em even if he gets the chance. Somebody has to go with him, see what can be had.”

“Then I will go, too.”

“You wanna leave Kallik an’ Graves in charge, without two ounces of sense between ’em? Somebody has to stay here an’ keep things rollin’ smooth.”

“Then you can stay. I will go, in your place.”

“Don’t be crazy. You and Rebka can’t say one word that the other understands. I hafta go.”

“It is the human female, Darya Lang. You seek to succor her.”

“Succor! No way. I don’t know the meaning of the word. At, you’re gettin’ a real obsession about that woman.”

“One of us surely is.”

“Well, it ain’t me.” Nenda bobbed out from beneath the carapace and started into the hatch. “At, you just gotta trust me.”

The Cecropian moved slowly out of the way. “I see little choice. However, I have conditions. We have waited too long, and deviated far from our original objectives. I want a promise from you, Louis Nenda, here and now: that if I remain we will, as soon as possible after your return from Genizee, take possession of this ship for our own use. A safe path out of the Torvil Anfract is easy, according to Dulcimer — it is only the entry that is difficult and perilous. So you and I will leave the Erebus in this ship and return to Glister, where we will find your own ship, the Have-It-All. We have procrastinated long enough.”

“Hey, I miss the Have-It-All as much as you do — more. You got a deal. Soon as I get back, we go.”

“Just the two of us.”

“Who else? Sure, just the two of us. Go pack your bags. I gotta be on my way, Rebka’s all ready an’ waitin’.” He cut off pheromonal transmission to show that the conversation was over, and hurried back inside the Indulgence.

Hans Rebka was indeed waiting — but not for Louis Nenda. He was sitting at the controls and reentering an initializing sequence. His face showed total frustration. Nenda dropped into the seat next to him.

“What’s the holdup? Let’s get outa here.”

“I’d love to. If that would let me.” Rebka nodded to one of the displays. “I’m trying to open the connecting door to the outer hold. But the command set is being ignored.”

“It shows the outer door won’t cycle. That means the lock’s in use.”

“I know what it means — but that lock was empty when we came in through it.” Rebka was switching to a camera that should provide a view of the lock area. “So how could it be in use now?”

Louis Nenda did not need to attempt an answer. While they watched, the air-pump sequence had ended. The outer lock now possessed a balancing atmosphere with the inner hold, and the door between the chambers could at last slide open. Both men stared at the scene shown on the displays.

“It’s the seedship,” Nenda said. “How come it’s arrivin’ here now? Where’s it been all this time?” Before Hans Rebka could do anything to stop him Nenda ran back to the hatch, flipped it open, and within a second was free-falling through the open interlock door toward the smaller vessel.

Rebka followed at a slower pace. He could fill in a line of logic, and it made almost complete sense. He and his party had gone to Genizee on the seedship, but on their return to their landing place it was not there. They had been forced to return on the Indulgence. Darya Lang’s party had gone to Genizee on the Indulgence, but it had gone when they needed it. So they must have managed to locate the missing seedship on Genizee’s surface, and were now returning in it.

Almost complete sense. The mystery component was again J’merlia. He had vanished into a column of incandescent blue plasma on Genizee, and reappeared on the Erebus. But how had he come here, if not on the seedship?

Louis Nenda was already over at the ship, cycling the lock. As soon as it was half-open he was squeezing through. Rebka followed, surprised at his own sense of foreboding.

“Darya?” he said, as he emerged from the lock. If she was not there… But Louis Nenda was turning to him, and one glance at his face said that he did not have the news that Hans Rebka wanted to hear.

“Not Darya,” Nenda said. “Only one person on board. I hope you got an explanation, Captain, because I know I don’t. Take a peek.”

He moved to one side, so that Hans Rebka could see the seedship pilot’s seat. Lolling there, breathing but unconscious, was the angular stick-thin figure of J’merlia.