Convergent Series (42 page)

Darya paused. Better leave it at that, and not stick her neck out too far. But personally she was sure it was an artifact. And if that was the case it should be given its own name and ID number, like every other Builder artifact.

She added a final note to the message. "The artificial planetoid has been assigned the provisional Universal Artifact Catalog number 1237, and the provisional name"—she recalled the bright motes on the sphere's image, now vanished—"the provisional name of
Glister
."

"Darya?" Hans Rebka's voice came as she was making the final entry. "Darya, we're over at the
Have-It-All
now. It seems to be in working order, but you ought to see it for yourself. Can you put your suit on and walk over?"

"I'll be there in five minutes." Darya initiated the message transmission, put the
Summer Dreamboat
into self-protect mode, and moved across to the lock. In less than a minute she was outside.

She looked up. Gargantua loomed in the distance beyond the other ship. High above her head the Phages were invisible, too small to be seen from fifty or a hundred kilometers away, but she had no doubt that they were still there. Phages were always there when they were not wanted.

And what Phages! Phages smart enough to track a falling ship. Phages fast enough to head for that ship. Phages fast enough to come close to catching it.

Darya began to move slowly across the curved and polished surface. The horizon was only a couple of hundred meters away. As Louis Nenda's ship came more and more into view she could not help glancing up every few seconds, to make sure that some marauding Phage was not diving down on her.

Phages didn't enter powerful gravity fields; in fact, they shunned them. Sure. That was the conventional wisdom. Until today she had believed it herself. But why assume that conventional wisdom applied to these Phages, and this situation, when everything else about them was so bizarre?

It occurred to Darya that Kallik had taken a bigger risk than they realized when she had brought them down here. The alien surface of Glister might be no safer than Phage-infested space. But Kallik's own need to know what had happened to Louis Nenda had made her blind to risk.

Darya arrived at the lock of the
Have-It-All
. One thing was for sure: given the behavior of these new Phages, she would have to do a major rewrite of that section of the
Lang Universal Artifact Catalog
. Good timing. She was supposed to begin work on the fifth edition when she got back home.

When she got back home . . .

She stared out across the smooth, glassy surface of Glister before she entered the lock. The little ship they had arrived on was the only familiar object. The
Summer Dreamboat
had started its life as a teenager's toy; now it was far from home, looking oddly lonely and defenseless.

Would it ever see its birth world again? And would she see hers?

Darya closed the hatch. When she got home. Better make that
if
she got home.

Exploration History:
The first Phages were reported by humans during the exploration of Flambeau, in E 1233. Subsequently, it was learned that Phages had been observed and avoided by Cecropian explorers for at least five thousand years. The first human entry of a Phage maw was made in E 1234 during the Maelstrom conflict (no survivors).
 

Phage-avoidance systems came into widespread use in E. 2103, and are now standard equipment in Builder exploration.
 

Physical Description:
The Phages are all externally identical, and probably internally similar though functionally variable. No sensor (or explorer) has ever returned from a Phage interior.
 

Each Phage has the form of a gray, regular dodecahedron, of side forty-eight meters. The surface is roughly textured, with mass sensors at the edge of each face. Maws can be opened at the center of any face and can ingest objects of up to thirty meters' radius and of apparently indefinite length. (In E 2238, Sawyer and S'kropa fed a solid silicaceous fragment of cylindrical cross-section and twenty-five meters' radius to a Phage of the Dendrite Artifact. With an ingestion rate of one kilometer per day, 425 kilometers of material, corresponding to the full length of the fragment, were absorbed. No mass change was detected in the Phage, nor a change in any other of its physical parameters.)
 

Phages are capable of slow independent locomotion, with a mean rate of one or two meters per standard day. No Phage has ever been seen to move at a velocity in excess of one meter per hour with respect to the local frame.
 

Intended Purpose:
Unknown. Were it not for the fact that Phages have been found in association with over 300 of the 1,200 known artifacts, and only in such association, any relationship to the Builders would be questioned. They differ greatly in scale and number from all other Builder constructs.
 

It has been speculated that the Phages served as general scavengers for the Builders, since they are apparently able to ingest and break down any materials made by the clades and anything made by the Builders with the single exception of the structural hulls and the paraforms (e.g., the external shell of Paradox, the surface of Sentinel, and the concentric hollow tubes of Maelstrom).
 

—From the
Lang Universal Artifact Catalog
, Fourth Edition.

Louis Nenda's ship was undamaged. Inside and out, every piece of equipment was in working order. The main drive showed signs of overload, but it still tested at close to full power.

"I'm sure that overload happened while they were in orbit around Quake," Darya said. "I told you, I saw them putting in every bit of thrust they had to try and get away from that silver sphere."

"Yeah. But you also said they were accelerated away by the sphere at hundreds of gees, enough to flatten everything." Hans Rebka waved an arm at the orderly interior. "Nothing flat here that I can see."

"Which is not difficult to explain." Kallik was crouched down on the floor by the
Have-It-All
's hatch, sniffing and clicking to herself. "If the ship were to be accelerated by gravity or any other form of body force, neither it nor its occupants would be harmed. They would feel as though they moved in free-fall, no matter how high the acceleration appeared to an outside observer."

"Which should mean that if the ship is undamaged, so are Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial." Rebka was inspecting the main control panel. "And the engines haven't been powered down. They're on standby, ready to fly this minute. Which leaves us with one question." He stared at Darya and shrugged. "Where the devil are they?"

They had searched the
Have-It-All
from side to side and top to bottom. There was ample evidence that Atvar H'sial and Louis Nenda had been there. But there was no sign of them, and no suits were missing from the lockers.

"Master Nenda was certainly here," Kallik said, "more than three days ago, and less than one week."

"How do you know?"

"I can smell him. In his quarters, at the controls, and here near the hatch. J'merlia, if he were here, could place the time more accurately. He has a finer sense of smell."

"I don't see how that would help us. Not even if J'merlia could smell it to the millisecond." Rebka was walking moodily around the big cabin, examining the decorated wall panels and running his fingers across the luxurious fittings. "Darya, I know you said that the sphere that carried this ship away was silver at first, then it turned to black—"

"Turned to nothing, I said. It was like a hole in space."

"All right, turned to nothing. But couldn't it have changed again? One odd thing about this place—wha'd'ya call it, Glister?—is that it's a perfect sphere. Spherical planetoids don't occur in nature. Hasn't it occurred to you that it may be the
same
sphere, the one that you saw?"

"Of course I've had that thought. I had it before we even landed. But it only leaves a bigger mystery.
Something
sent a beam from near Gargantua, at Summertide, and the sphere that I saw ascended it. If this sphere was
my
sphere, what sent the signal?"

"All right, so maybe this isn't
your
sphere." Rebka seemed amused by her proprietary tone. "I'll drop that, and ask you again: Where are they?"

"Give me a minute. I may have a logical answer; whether or not you like it is another matter." Darya sat down on one of Nenda's comfortable couches to organize her thoughts. As she did so she surveyed her surroundings, comparing them with the familiar, stripped-down, and spartan fixtures of the
Dreamboat
.

The contrast was great. The whole inside of Nenda's starship was filled with alien devices and manufacturing techniques. The technology used here had been perfected long before by the Zardalu, before their thousand-world empire had collapsed, and been picked up piecemeal after that collapse to become the common property of the mix of species that now made up the Zardalu Communion.

But even more than it spoke of alien technology, the
Have-It-All
proclaimed another message: that of
wealth
.

Darya had never seen such opulence—and she was from a rich world. If Louis Nenda was a criminal, as everyone seemed to think, then crime certainly paid.

In one other area, her first view of the interior of Nenda's ship was forcing a change in Darya's thinking. She had first met Kallik on Opal and on Quake, and had seen her then as a callously treated under-being, little better than a shackled and servile pet of the Karelian human, Louis Nenda. But Kallik's quarters on the
Have-It-All
were as good as Nenda's own, and far better than
anyone
enjoyed in the worlds of the Phemus Circle. Kallik had her own study, equipped with powerful computers and scientific instruments. She had her own sleeping area, decorated with choice and expensive examples of Hymenopt art.

Even villains deserved justice. Darya filed that thought away for future reference. Nenda might act the monster—might
be
a monster—but his generous private treatment of Kallik was at variance with his public image. Nenda had certainly been crude, lecherous, coarse, and boorish with Darya. But was that the
real
Louis Nenda, or was it a pose?

"Well?" Hans Rebka was staring at her impatiently. Darya came back to the present with a jerk and realized that her thoughts had strayed off in a quite unexpected and inappropriate direction.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Point one: Nenda and Atvar H'sial were alive when the ship got here. Kallik is sure of that. Point two: There are no suits missing. Point Three: The air on the surface of this planetoid is breathable. Point four—not proved, but a good working assumption: This planetoid is hollow. Point five—another working hypothesis: The inside of Glister contains the same sort of air as there is on the surface. Put them together: if Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial are still alive—or even if they're dead—we know where they can be found." She pointed at the floor.

"Inside Glister." Rebka was frowning. "That's what I decided, too, while you were sitting there daydreaming. I don't much like that idea."

"I never said you would."

"It gives us another problem."

"I know. To see if we're right, we have to get inside. And we haven't seen any sign of an opening or a hatch."

"On the descent, we certainly didn't." Rebka sat down in the control chair. "But that's not surprising—we had other things on our minds. There could be ways in just a hundred meters away, or there could be openings around the other side that we've never seen."

"And we won't find them sitting here." Darya stood up. She was full of an irrational energy. "You know what? I want to find Nenda and Atvar H'sial, and spit in their eye for trying to kill us on Quake. But even if they didn't exist, I'd want to find a way to the interior. And so would you. You pretend you're not interested in Builder artifacts, but you're the man who was all ready to risk a descent into Paradox, before you were sent to Dobelle. And this
is
an artifact. I've studied all twelve hundred and thirty-six of them, and I'm sure of it. Come on, let's take a look outside." Darya placed her hand on the control that would move her suit from full open to closed mode, then paused. "The air out there is supposed to be breathable. I might as well test it a little. Keep your eye on me."

She headed for the lock, expecting to hear Rebka's voice ordering her to stop. Instead he said in an amused tone, "I swear, if it isn't one of you wanting to run off and do something crazy, it's the other. Wait for me."

"And me," Kallik said.

"And don't worry about the air," Rebka added. "After the analysis was finished and came out positive I put my suit on partial transparency. Glister's atmosphere is fine."

"And you call
me
crazy." Darya stepped through into the lock.

In the time they had been inside Nenda's ship, Glister had made a quarter-turn on its axis. Gargantua was visible as a half-disk, while Mandel and Amaranth were hidden behind the planetoid. Darya emerged to an overhead dazzle of orbiting fragments and a cold, orange twilight. The air was odorless, tasteless, and chilly in her nose and lungs. Her breath showed as a puff of white fog when she exhaled.

What now?

Darya stared around at the featureless horizon. She began to walk forward, moving across Glister in the direction away from the
Dreamboat
. As she went she scanned the surface ahead. It had not occurred to her before, but without light from Mandel, visibility was going to be much reduced. Even using the image intensifiers in her suit she could not see details more than fifty meters away.

Darya slowed her pace. Kallik was a lightning calculator, but the Hymenopt was fifty meters behind and Darya would have to work it out for herself. A little more than a kilometer in radius. So the surface area of Glister was a bit less than seventeen square kilometers. And she could see things clearly for at most fifty meters in each direction. Assume that they split up and found an efficient way of covering the whole area. Then each of them would have to walk over fifty kilometers to be sure of finding whatever might be there.