Transcendence

Chapter Three: Miranda

The waiting rooms of Miranda Spaceport were Downside, in the ninth passenger ring twenty-six miles from the foot of the Stalk. Cleanup and maintenance was the job of the service robots, but ever since the incident when the Doradan Colubrid ambassador had accidentally been left to sit and patiently starve to death while robots dutifully dusted and mopped and polished around and over her, human supervisors had made occasional routine inspections.

One of those supervisors had been hovering around waiting room 7872, where a silent figure occupied and overflowed a couch in the room’s center. Supervisor Garnoff had three times approached, and three times retreated.

He knew the life-form well enough. It was an adult Cecropian, one of the giant blind arthropods who dominated the Cecropia Federation. This one was strange in two ways. First, she was alone. The Lo’tfian slave-translator who invariably accompanied a Cecropian was absent. And second, the Cecropian had an indefinably dusty and battered look. The six jointed legs were sprawled anyhow around the carapace, rather than being tucked neatly beneath in the conventional rest position. The end of the thin proboscis, instead of being folded into a pouch on the bottom of the pleated chin, was drooping out and down onto the dark-red segmented chest.

The big question was, was she alive and well? The Cecropian had not moved since Garnoff first came on duty five hours earlier. He came to stand in front of her. The white, eyeless head did not move.

“Are you all right?”

He did not expect a spoken answer, although the Cecropian, if she was alive, undoubtedly heard him with the yellow open horns set in the middle of her head. Since all Cecropians “saw” by echolocation, sending high-frequency sonic pulses from the pleated resonator on the chin, she had sensitive hearing all through and far beyond the human frequency range.

On the other hand, she could not speak to him in any language that he would understand. With hearing usurped for vision, Cecropians “spoke” to each other chemically, with a full and rich language, through the emission and receipt of pheromones. The pair of fernlike antennas on top of the great blind head could detect and identify single molecules of the many thousands of different airborne odors generated by the apocrine ducts on the Cecropian’s thorax.

But if she was alive, she must know that he was talking to her; and she should at least register his presence.

There was no reaction. The yellow horns did not turn in his direction; the long antennas remained furled.

“I said, are you all right?” He spoke more loudly. “Is there anything you need? Can you hear me?”

“She sure can,” said a human voice behind him. “And she thinks you’re a pain in the ass. So bug off and leave her alone.”

Garnoff turned. Standing right in front of him was a short, swarthy man in a ragged shirt and dirty trousers. He needed a shave, and his eyes were tired and bloodshot. But there was plenty of energy in his stance.

“And who the devil might you be?” It was not the supervisor’s approved form of address to Mirandan visitors, but the newcomer’s strut encouraged it.

“My name’s Louis Nenda. I’m a Karelian, though I don’t see how that’s any of your damn business.”

“I’m a supervisor here. My business is making sure everything’s going all right in the waiting rooms. And she” — Garnoff pointed — “don’t look too hot to me.”

“She’s not. She’s tired. I’m tired. We’ve come a long way. So leave us alone.”

“Oh? Since when did you learn to read Cecropian thoughts? You don’t know how she feels. Seems to me she might be in trouble.”

The squat stranger began to stretch to his full height, then changed his mind and sat down, squeezing onto the couch next to the Cecropian. “What the hell. I got too much to do to hassle on this. Atvar H’sial’s my partner. I understand her, she understands me. Here, take a look at this place from ten feet up.”

He sat silent for a second, frowning at nothing. Suddenly the Cecropian at his side moved. Two of the jointed forearms reached out to grip Garnoff by the waist. Before the supervisor could do more than shout, he was lifted into the air, high above the Cecropian’s great white head, and held there wriggling.

“All right, At, that’s enough. Put him down easy.” Louis Nenda nodded as the Cecropian gently lowered Garnoff to the floor. “Happy now? Or do you need a full-scale demo?”

But Garnoff was already backing away, out of reach of the long jointed limbs. “You can both stay here and rot, far as I’m concerned.” When he was at a safe distance he paused. “How the hell did you do that? Talk to her, I mean. I thought no human could communicate with a Cecropian without an interpreter.”

Louis Nenda shrugged without looking at Garnoff. “Got me an augment, back on Karelia. Send and receive. Cost a lot, but it’s been worth it. Now, you go an’ give us a bit of peace.”

He waited until Garnoff was at the entrance to the waiting room, forty meters away. “You were right, At.” The silent and invisible pheromonal message diffused across to the Cecropian’s receptors. “They’re here on Miranda, staying over in Delbruck. Both of ’em, J’merlia and Kallik.”

There was a slow, satisfied nodding of the blind white head. “So I surmised.” Atvar H’sial vibrated her wing cases, as though shaking off the dust of weeks of travel. “That is satisfactory. Did you establish communication?”

“Not from here. Too dangerous. We don’t call ’em, see, till we know we can get to ’em in person. That way nobody can talk them out of it.”

“No one will talk my J’merlia out of anything, once he knows that I am alive and present again in the spiral arm. But I accept that personal contact is preferable… if it can be accomplished. How do you propose that we proceed?”

“Well…” Louis Nenda reached into his pocket and pulled out a wafer-thin card. “That last jump pushed us down to the bottom of our credit. How far to Delbruck?”

“Two thousand four hundred kilometers, by direct flight.”

“We can’t afford that. What about overland?”

“How are the mighty fallen.” Atvar H’sial sat crouched for a moment in calculation. “Three thousand eight hundred kilometers over land, if we avoid crossing any water body.”

“Okay.” It was Nenda’s turn to calculate. “Three days by ground transport. Just enough for the trip, with nothing left at the end. Not even for food on the way. What do you think?”

“I do not think.” The pheromones were touched with resignation. “When there is no choice, I act.”

The great Cecropian untucked her six limbs. She stood erect to tower four feet above Louis Nenda. “Come. As we say in my species, Delay is the deadliest form of denial. To Delbruck.”

It was a transformed Louis Nenda who led Atvar H’sial off the bus in Delbruck three days later. He was clean-shaven and wearing a smart new outfit of royal blue.

“Well, that worked out real nice.” The pheromones grinned at Atvar H’sial while Nenda waved a serious good-bye to four gloomy passengers. He hailed a local cab sized to accommodate large aliens.

The Cecropian nodded. “It worked. But it will not work twice, Louis Nenda.”

“Sure it’ll work. ‘One born every minute’ needs updating. One born ever second is more like it. The arm’s full of ’em.”

“They were becoming suspicious.”

“Of what? They checked the shoe to make sure there was no way anyone could see into it.”

“At some point one of them would wonder if the shoe were equally opaque to sound.” Atvar H’sial sprawled luxuriantly across the back of the cab and opened her black wing cases to soak up the sun. The delicate vestigial wings within were marked by red and white elongated eyespots.

“What if they did? They made you sit over in the back, where you were out of sight of me.”

“Perhaps. But at some point one of them would have begun to wonder about pheromones, and nonverbal and nonvisual signals. I tell you, I will not repeat that exercise.”

“Hey, don’t start feeling sorry for them. They work for the Alliance government. They’ll chisel it back. All it means is another microcent on the taxes.”

“You misunderstand my motives.” The yellow horns quivered. “I am of a race destined to build worlds, to light new suns, to rule whole galaxies. I will not again sink to such trivia. It is beneath the dignity of a Cecropian.”

“Sure, At. Beneath mine, too. And you might get caught.” Nenda peered up to the top of the building where the cab had halted. He turned to the driver. “You real sure of this address?”

“Positive. Fortieth floor and up, air-breathing aliens only. Just like the bug here.” The cabbie stared down his nose at Atvar H’sial and drove off.

Nenda glared after the cab, shrugged, and led the way inside.

The air in the building was filled with a stench of rotting seaweed. It made Nenda’s nose wrinkle as they entered the thirty-foot cube of the elevator. “Air-breathers! Smells more like Karelian mud-divers to me.” But Atvar H’sial was nodding happily. “It is indeed the right place.” The antennas on top of her eyeless white head partially unfurled. “I can detect traces of J’merlia. He has been inside this structure within the past few hours. Let us proceed higher.”

Even with his augment, Nenda lacked the Cecropian’s infinitely refined sensitivity to odors. He took them up floor by floor in the elevator, until Atvar H’sial finally nodded.

“This one.” But now the pheromones carried a hint of concern.

“What’s wrong, At?”

“In addition to traces of my J’merlia, and to your Hymenopt, Kallik…” She was moving along a broad corridor, and at last paused before a door tall and wide enough to admit something twice her size. “I seem to detect — wait!”

It was too late. Nenda had pressed the side plate and the great door was already sliding open. The Cecropian and the Karelian human found themselves on the threshold of a domed and cavernous chamber, forty meters across.

Nenda peered in through the gloom. “You were wrong, At. There’s nobody in here.”

But the Cecropian had reared up to her full height and was pointing off to the side where two figures were bent over a low table. They looked up as the door opened. There was a gasp of mutual recognition. Instead of seeing the stick-thin figure of a Lo’tfian and the tubby round body of the Hymenopt, Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial were facing the human forms of Alliance Councilor Graves and embodied computer, E.C. Tally.

“We were dumped off in the middle of nowhere…”

There had been half a minute of surprised and unproductive reaction — “What are you two doing here? You’re supposed to be off chasing Zardalu…” “More to the point, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be thirty thousand light-years away, out on Serenity and fighting each other…” After a little of that, Louis Nenda had been given the floor. His pheromonal aside to Atvar H’sial — Don’t worry. Trust me! — went unnoticed by the other two.

“… dumped with just the clothes we were wearing, and no warning that anything funny was going to happen. One minute we were standing in one of the main chambers, the same one where we rolled the Zardalu into the transition vortex—”

— and where we had the biggest pile of loot pulled together that you’d see in a dozen lifetimes. I know, At, I’m not going to say that. But it’s hard — fifty new bits of Builder technology, each one priceless and ready to grab. Two and a half months’ work, all down the tubes. Well, no good crying over what might have been —

And may yet be, Louis. Surrender wins no wars.

Mebbe. It’s still hard.

Graves and E.C. Tally were staring at Nenda, puzzled by his sudden silence. He returned to human speech: “Sorry. Started thinkin’ about it again. Anyway, all of a sudden Speaker-Between, that know-it-all Builder construct, popped up right behind us, quiet like, so we didn’t know he was there. He said, ‘This is not what was agreed to. It is unacceptable.’ And the next minute—”

“May I speak?” E.C. Tally’s voice was loud and off-putting.

Nenda turned to Julian Graves. “Couldn’t you stop him doing that when you gave him a new body copy? What’s wrong now, E.C.?”

“It was reported to me by Councilor Graves that you and Atvar H’sial were left behind on Serenity not to cooperate, but to engage in single combat. That is not at all the way that you are now describing matters.”

“Ah, well, that was somethin’ me and At worked out after your lot had left. Better to cooperate at first, see, until we understood the environment on Serenity, an’ after that we’d have plenty of time to fight it out between us—”

— as indeed we would have fought, Louis, once we were home in the spiral arm with substantial booty. For there are limits to cooperation, and the Builder treasures are vast. But pray continue…

If anyone will let me, I will. Shut up, At, so I can talk.

“ — so Atvar H’sial and I had been working together, trying to figure out where the Zardalu were likely to have gone after they left Serenity—” And making sure we didn’t finish up anywhere near them when we left Serenity ourselves. ” — because, you see, there was this little baby Zardalu who had been left behind when all the others went ass-over-tentacle down the chute—”

“Excuse me.” Julian Graves’s great bald, radiation-scarred head nodded forward on its pipestem neck. “This is of extreme importance. Are you saying that there was a Zardalu left behind on Serenity?”

“That’s exactly what I said. You have a problem with that, Councilor?”

“On the contrary. And by the way, it is now ex-councilor. I resigned from the Council over this very issue. The Alliance Council listened — perfunctorily, in my opinion — and rejected our concerns in their totality! They do not believe that we traveled together to Serenity. They do not believe that we encountered Builder sentient artifacts. Worst of all, they deny that we encountered living, breathing Zardalu. They claim we imagined all of it. So if you have with you a specimen, an infant or a dead body, or even the smallest end sucker of a tentacle—”

“Sorry. I hear you, but we don’t have even a sniff. It’s Speaker-Between’s dumb fault again. He accused me and Atvar H’sial of cooperating, instead of feuding; and before we could tell him that he was full of it, he made one of those hissing teakettle noises like he was boiling over, and another one of them vortices swirled up right next to us. It threw us into the Builder transportation system. Just before the vortex got us it grabbed the little Zardalu. He went God-knows-where. We haven’t seen him since. Atvar H’sial and I come out together in the ass end of the Zardalu Communion, on a little rathole of a planet called Peppermill. But my ship was still on Glister, along with all our major credit. It took our last sou to get us to Miranda. And here we are.”

“May I speak?” But this time Tally did not wait for permission. “You are here. I see that. But why are you here? I mean, why did you come to Miranda, where neither you nor Atvar H’sial are at home? Why did you not go to some other and more familiar region of the spiral arm?”

Careful! Councilor Graves, whether he be Julius, Steven, or Julian, can read more truth than you think. Atvar H’sial’s comment to Louis Nenda was more a command than a warning.

Relax, At! This is the time to tell the truth. “Because until we can return to the planetoid Glister and to my ship, the Have-It-All, Atvar H’sial and I are flat broke. The only valuable things that either of us own” — Nenda reached into his pants pocket, pulled out two little squares of recorder plastic, and squeezed them — “are these.”

Under the pressure of his fingers, the squares began to intone simultaneously: “This is the ownership certificate of the Lo’tfian, J’merlia, ID 1013653, with all rights assigned to the Cecropian dominatrix, Atvar H’sial.” “This is the ownership certificate of the Hymenopt, Kallik WSG, ID 265358979, with all rights assigned to the Karelian human, Louis Nenda.” And to repeat: “This is the ownership certificate of the Lo’tfian, J’merlia, ID—”

“That’ll do.” Nenda pressed the edge of the plastic wafers, and they fell silent. “The slaves J’merlia and Kallik are the only assets we got left, but we own ’em free and clear, as you know and as these documents prove.”

Nenda paused for breath. The hard bit was coming right now.

“So we’ve come here to claim ’em and take ’em back to Miranda Port, and rent ’em out so we’ll have enough credit to travel back to Glister and get the Have-It-All.” He glared at Graves. “And it’s no good you gettin’ mad and tellin’ us that J’merlia and Kallik are free agents because we let ’em go free back on Serenity, because none of that’s documented, and these” — he waved the squares — “prove otherwise. So don’t give me any of that. Just tell me, where are they?”

Graves was going to give him a big argument, Nenda just knew it. He faced the councilor, waiting for the outburst.

It never came. Multiple expressions were running across Graves’s face, but not one of them looked like anger. There was satisfaction and irony, and even what might be a certain amount of sympathy in those mad and misty gray eyes.

“I cannot deliver J’merlia and Kallik to you, Louis Nenda,” he said. “Even if I would. For one very good reason. They are not here. Both of them left Delbruck just two hours ago — on a high-speed transit to Miranda Port.”