Convergence
Convergence
Four days and six Bose Transitions
later, Louis Nenda was beginning to have second thoughts. The Indulgence was on its final,
slow, subluminal leg of the journey from the Torvil Anfract, heading out from the star
Mandel toward its gasgiant planet, Gargantua. Nenda's own ship, the Have-it-all, should be
where they had left it months earlier, on Glister, the little artificial planetoid that
orbited Gargantua.
The journey from the edge of the Anfract
had gone without a hitch. They had found no sign of the changes to the Spiral Arm that had
worried Atvar H'sial. And that, when you got right down to it, was the source of Nenda's
own uneasiness.
He was a squat, muscular human, born
(though he could certainly never go back there) on the minor planet of Karelia, in a
remote part of Zardalu Communion territory. Atvar H'sial was a towering Cecropian, from
one of the leading worlds of the Cecropia Federation.
He preferred brutal directness; she was
all slippery tangents. He might kill in moments of anger. She never seemed to feel anger,
but she would destroy through calm calculation. They happened to be able to speak to each
other, because Nenda had long ago obtained an augment for just such a purpose, but their
overlap ended there. He and Atvar H'sial seemed to have nothing in common.
And yet . . .
They had first met on the doublet planet
of Quake and Opal, in the Mandel stellar system where they now moved. Somehow, like had
called instantly to like. When it came to business practices, Nenda knew that he did not
need to ask Atvar H'sial's opinion. It was enough to sound out his own. In Louis Nenda's
view, all sensible beings had the same business principles.
And what were they?
Sensible beings did not discuss such
matters.
Which meant that if Atvar H'sial ever had
an opportunity to cheat Louis Nenda, without risk to herself, she would surely do it.
Mutual need had held them together on
Genizee, but that was over now. He could not see how she might be setting him up, but a
good scam was never discernible in advance. And of course, there was another reason why he
was not a good target: the only things he owned in the whole world, now that his slave was
gone, were the clothes he stood up in; plus his ship, the Have-It-All-if they ever got
that far.
Louis Nenda sank back into uneasy sleep.
* * *
He had spent most of the journey to
Mandel napping, or trying to, as much as the corkscrew template of the Chism Polypheme
bunk permitted. When discomfort and boredom finally drove him once more to the control
room, he found that Atvar H'sial had been busy. She had rigged the electronics so that the
visual signals of Nenda's display screens were converted to multi-source ultrasonics. She
now "saw" just what he saw, although so far as he could tell it was not in
color.
And what she claimed now, as the result of
that "seeing," roused Nenda's worst suspicions.
"As I anticipated, Louis," she
said. "There have been changes in the Mandel system, and profound ones. See."
Nenda found himself staring at the
display, wondering and waiting. The screen contained an image of the gasgiant planet,
Gargantua. The atmosphere, with its smog of photo-dissociated organic compounds, showed as
swirling bands of orange and umber. They glowed like high-quality zircon and hessonite,
separated by thinner streaks and dots of blue-white ammonia clouds.
"I have arranged this as a time-lapse
sequence of images, in order that you will see at once what took me many hours of
observation to discern." Atvar H'sial reached out a clawed forelimb, and the display
began to move. Gargantua was rotating on its axis, the image speeded up so that the
planet's stately ten hours of revolution took less than a minute.
Louis watched, but found nothing to see.
Just a stupid planet, turning on its axis as it had done for the past few hundred million
years, and as it no doubt would for the next.
"Do you see it?" Atvar H'sial
was hovering beside him.
"Of course I see it. D'you think I've
gone blind?"
"I mean-do you see the change?"
It took another whole revolution before
Louis felt his breath catch in his throat. He had it at last. "The Eye!"
The Eye of Gargantua. The orange-red,
atmospheric vortex that peered balefully out of the planet's equatorial latitudes. A
permanent circulation pattern, a giant whirlpool of frozen gases, a hurricane forty
thousand kilometers across-sustained not by nature, but by the presence at its center of
the vortex of a Builder transportation system.
"The Eye has gone!"
"It has indeed." Atvar H'sial's
eyeless white head nodded her assent. "Vanished without a trace, even though it has
been there for as long as humans have been in the Mandel system to observe it. And that
inevitably sets up a train of thought. If the Builder transportation system on Gargantua
has gone, then there seems a good chance that the entry point to that system, on the
planetoid Glister, has likewise vanished. And indeed I can detect no trace of Glister at
all, even with the ship's most powerful detection devices. Now, since Glister has
vanished-"
Nenda roared with rage. He was way ahead
of her. Glister had gone. And his ship-the Have-It-All, the only thing that he owned-had
been left on Glister.
The whole thing must be part of some scam
that Atvar H'sial was trying to pull on him.
He dived at the Cecropian, and went in
swinging.
* * *
Louis had been wrong about Atvar
H'sial's physical power. She was not four times as strong as he was. Ten times was more
like it.
She held him effortlessly upside-down in
her two front limbs, and hissed reprovingly-her echo-location equivalent of a rude
gesture.
"To what end, Louis Nenda? And how?
Like you, I have been on this ship continuously since we rose from the surface of Genizee.
Modesty is not a quality usually ascribed to me, but in this case I confess that cheating
you in the way that you are thinking is beyond my powers-whether or not it might be beyond
my desires. I say again, how could I make Glister and the Have-It-All disappear, while
traveling from the Torvil Anfract?"
Louis had stopped struggling, except for
breath. A Cecropian's restraining hold was almost enough to crack a man's ribs. It was
just as well that pheromonal speech did not need the use of lungs.
"Okay, Okay. You can put me down now.
Easy!" Too rapidly inverted, he staggered as his feet met the deck. "Look. Try
to see it from my point of view. If the Have-It-All was your ship, and I came along and
told you it had vanished away-wouldn't you get angry, and do just what I did?"
"Anger, if it implies loss of
control, is alien to a Cecropian. And given the disproportion of our sizes and strengths,
it is well for you that I not respond as you did."
"Sure. But you get my point."
"As surely as you have missed mine.
The loss of the Have-It-All is unfortunate, but the vanishing of the Builder
transportation system is incomparably more significant. No longer can we hope to visit the
artifact of Serenity, with the Builder riches that it contains. Even beyond that, my
conviction that important changes continue to occur throughout the Spiral Arm remains
unshaken. The events on and around Gargantua point more clearly than ever to the Builders
as the agent of that change."
"Don't kid yourself, At. They've been
gone at least three million years."
"What goes, can return. Builder
Artifacts still dominate the Spiral Arm. We need the use of an expert on the Builders. I
almost wish I could-"
"Could what?" Nenda had caught a
hint of something hidden in the pheromones, a person's name about to be revealed, and then
just as hastily disguised.
"Nothing. But with the Eye of
Gargantua gone, and Glister vanished, there seems little point in approaching closer to
Gargantua itself. I wonder . . ."
The pheromones carried no word pattern.
Louis Nenda saw instead the doublet worlds of Quake and Opal, spinning about each other.
"Want to go back there, At, take
another look at Quake? Summertide's a long time past; it's probably real quiet now."
"A landing, no. But a close approach
might be . . . interesting."
* * *
Atvar H'sial refused to say more as the
Indulgence approached the doublet planet. Which left it to Louis Nenda to peer at the
displays, and puzzle over what "interesting" might mean.
Quake and Opal were sister worlds, Quake
just a fraction the smaller, spinning madly about each other. The closest points of their
surfaces were only twelve thousand kilometers apart, their "day" was only eight
hours long. But in everything except size, the two worlds were a study in contrasts: Opal,
the water-world, had no land other than the floating soil-and-vegetation masses of the
Slings; Quake, the desert world, was inimical to human life, shaken by great land tides at
the doublet's closest approach to the parent star, Mandel.
Stretching between the two, like a slender
tower with bases on both worlds, was the Umbilical.
Nenda stared at the screen, and waited for
the Umbilical to become visible. Its thread of silvery alloy was bright, but it was no
more than forty meters across. The first part to come into view would surely be the Winch,
located roughly midway.
Except that it wasn't happening. Nenda had
made the approach to Quake and Opal before. Last time, he had seen the Umbilical from much
farther away.
Where was it?
He glanced at Atvar H'sial. She, intent on
her own ultrasonic displays, was frozen at his side.
"I can't see it, At. Can you?"
He thought at first that his message had
gone unreceived. The reply, when it came, was diffuse and hesitant. "We do not see
it, because it is not there. The Umbilical was also a Builder Artifact. And it too has
vanished. Quake and Opal are no longer connected."
"What's going on, At?"
"I do not know."
"But, hell, you predicted this."
"I expected a possible anomaly. But
as to why . . ."
Nenda waited in vain for a continued
message. As he did so, he caught the faintest hint of a name in the pheromonal
emissions-the same name that had occurred before in Atvar H'sial's thoughts, and had as
rapidly been suppressed.
"Darya Lang!" Nenda shouted the
words aloud, as well as sending them in a pheromonal flood. "I know where we can find
her."
Atvar H'sial froze rigid. "Why do you
say that name?"
"Because you've been thinking it, and
trying to keep it from me. Darya's the Arm's top expert on the Builders. You know it. You
think she'll understand what's going on."
"I doubt that Darya Lang's
comprehension is better than my own." But Atvar H'sial's pheromonal words were
soft-edged and unconvincing.
"Another half-lie. It doesn't have to
be better for the two of you to make progress. Two heads are better than one-even if one
of them is a Cecropian."
It was a deadly insult, and a deliberate
one. Nenda was making his own test. And Atvar H'sial's response, when it came, was
revealingly mild.
"I do not question Professor Lang's
competence-in her specialized field. I do, however, question the wisdom of meeting with
her. Even if, as you say, you can predict her location."
"She's back home on Sentinel Gate,
sure as shooting. But if you're afraid of coming off second-best with her . . ."
"That is not my concern, and you well
know it." The Cecropian's message was tinged with acid. "I worry about meeting
with her not for my sake, but for yours."
"Hey, I don't claim to be the Builder
expert."
"Enough deliberate innocence. You
know why I worry about your meeting. Deny it as you choose, Louis Nenda, but you have a
powerful emotional attachment to that human female. In previous encounters Darya Lang has
diverted your attention, blunted your limited powers of ratiocination, and made your every
decision suspect."
"You're full of it. Didn't I leave
her behind, to fly with you on the Indulgence when we thought there was profit to be had?
Anyway, you don't know humans. Darya Lang already picked her man. She chose Hans Rebka,
that trouble-shooter from the Phemus Circle."
"A choice which you, at least, have
not accepted. Human females are not like Cecropian males, mating until death."
"Don't you trust her?"
"Neither her, nor you. Although I
admit that it might be useful to confer with Darya Lang, in order to learn more of the
Artifact changes."
"Listen to me." Nenda advanced
to stand directly below the thorax of Atvar H'sial, where the pheromonal messages were
most distinct. "Here's the deal. We go to Sentinel Gate, and we see what we can learn
from Darya Lang. Straight facts, pure business, nothing personal. Stay there no more than
one day. Soon as we have all we can get from her, we leave. Just you and me. And we find a
way to make some money out of what we learned. End of story."
"You pledge this?" Atvar H'sial
was on the point of believing him-or pretending to, for her own reasons.
"Cross my heart." Nenda made the
sign on his chest.
"An activity which, as you well know,
has no meaning to a Cecropian." There was a cinnamon whiff of regret, together with a
scent of acceptance. "Very well. I agree. We go to Sentinel Gate-and there will be no
emotional coupling with Darya Lang."
"Trust me. That's not the sort I had
in mind, anyway."
But Louis did not offer his last sentence
in pheromonal form.
Copyright © 1997 by