Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

“The new collective of Blessed Union left, promising to return no later than nightfall. After components of the collective had departed we pumped the airlock dry, slowly and laboriously; and we waited. That was days ago. We are waiting still, though our time of hope is ending.”

The Pipe-Rilla began to rock slowly up and down, half-extending her hind limbs. Finally Bony asked, “Do you think that Blessed Union has been killed?”

At the question, the Pipe-Rilla covered her eyes with her forelimbs. Bony wondered if he had committed some dreadful inter-species violation of protocol.

Finally Vow-of-Silence said, “This is a matter of some delicacy. It is possible, yes, that Blessed Union was destroyed. However, it is rather more likely that Blessed Union swarmed . You see” — the narrow head bowed low and the sibilant voice dropped in volume — “we knew at the outset that there was a risk. Eager Seeker was, by intention, an unusually abundant Composite. Once on land, the urge of Blessed Union to swarm and breed and form a second independent Composite may have been irresistible. This possibility is, of course, a matter of great potential embarrassment to Eager-Seeker. A Tinker never admits to such unsanctioned breeding. And still we do not know what lies ashore. The Sea-wanderers cannot tell us. Are you able to answer the question?”

“Not completely. But how do you talk to the Sea-wanderers, if you can’t leave the ship?”

“Through the translator, of course, on the hull. Did you not see it?”

Bony hadn’t. Among the thousand devices that festooned the outside of the Finder , it was easy to miss any particular one. But Bony also had the feeling that he had seen too little overall, and understood even less.

“We did go ashore,” he said. “Once. But we found no sign of your companions. Of course, we were there for only a little while, and it would have been very easy to miss them.”

He described his and Liddy’s experience, including the brief glimpse of a great trifoliate flying vehicle. He offered his impression of what the land interior looked like. Finally he told of the foaming circle in the sea, a place that might form part of a Link entry point.

That grabbed the attention of his audience. Vow-of-Silence said at once, “Aha! Where was this anomaly located?”

“It’s hard to describe in words. If only we had a map …”

“One moment.” Vow-of-Silence picked up a flat plate and a marker and began to draw. She did it without looking, and her movements were so fast it seemed impossible for them to be accurate. In less than thirty seconds she was showing the result to Bony and Liddy. She said diffidently, “This is based on conversations with the Sea-wanderers and our own observations. It is, of course, no more than a tiny region of the whole of Limbo, but it represents our current knowledge. Here is where we are.”

She touched the plate, where she had drawn a tiny but recognizable picture of the Finder . “And here is the shoreline. Now, where was the steaming circle in the water?”

“About here.” Bony stabbed at the drawing with an index finger. “I think that’s right. Liddy?”

She nodded. “I couldn’t put it any closer. When we went ashore we travelled as far as here .” She touched a point on the upper right of the plate, and Vow-of-Silence instantly added a notation there and a dotted line leading from the shore. Liddy nodded, frowned, and said, “But what’s this ?”

Bony had not noticed it when he examined the plate, but a small circle toward the top left contained another small and stylized drawing. He stared at it. His eyes were not acute enough to make out the fine detail.

“It looks like—” Liddy turned to Vow-of-Silence. “I’ve never seen one, but I’ve seen drawings of Angels that look like that.”

“Of course.” The narrow head bobbed. “When I said at the beginning of this meeting that there was a third ship, I was referring to your vessel. The second ship, the one that the Sea-wanderers told us about and which apparently arrived soon after we did, is an Angel ship. And there is — not surprisingly — an Angel on board.”

The Angel ship sat about five kilometers away from the original position of the Mood Indigo , on a narrow part of the same off-shore shelf. Looking at the map drawn by Vow-of-Silence, Bony realized for the first time how lucky they had been. Only a couple of hundred yards seaward of where the Mood Indigo had landed, the map showed the seabed dropping off steeply to a region marked “Deep Water.” Too deep, apparently, for the Sea-wanderers, and more than deep enough to cave in the hull of any ship unfortunate enough to descend there.

The Angel ship had been even luckier than the Mood Indigo . According to the drawing it sat on the very brink of the shelf, which was unusually narrow at that point. Twenty meters in one direction would plunge the ship into the abyss. Fifty meters the other way would bring it onto the rocky beach. Eager Seeker and Vow-of-Silence had been considering a visit to the Angel when Bony and Liddy arrived, but they were reluctant to leave the Finder while there was any chance at all that Blessed Union might return.

There had seemed no great urgency in a visit to the Angel ship. That idea changed as Vow-of-Silence was pointing out a river on the map, used in the past by the Sea-wanderers to penetrate a little way inland while remaining under water.

“Here is the farthest point of their progress.” The Pipe-Rilla tapped it with a black claw. “They call it Bad Things Fork, and also Death Fork. Any Sea-wanderer who went beyond it never returned.”

She was interrupted when a unit in the control desk of the Finder suddenly beeped for attention, and a bubbling voice that seemed to speak without consonants said, “It darkens. Violence comes in the above the world. We will feel it in the world. We go to seek safeness in down.”

“The Sea-wanderers.” Vow-of-Silence leaned across to the sound unit and said clearly, “We hear you, and we thank you for the warning.”

Liddy added, “I hear them, but what do they mean?”

“It has happened before, probably before your arrival on this world.” Vow-of-Silence bent to a remote viewer and called for a new display. “So far as these natives are concerned, the sea is the world. The atmosphere of the planet is the above-the-world. The Sea-wanderers can tell when a surface storm is on the way, and when that is the case they refuse to go near the shore. There are huge breakers, and strong currents. Look at the sky thirty kilometers west of here, and you will see what is coming our way.”

If the ship could receive a distant view from above the surface, why had it not been able to learn the fate of the Tinkers who went ashore? Bony postponed the question. It was less important at the moment than what filled the display. The time was close to the middle of Limbo’s day, but the blue sun’s disk shone only intermittently. The clear sky had filled with clots and streaks of gray and black clouds, torn by wind and driving along furiously. The same force that propelled them across the sky lashed the sea surface into monstrous surges, broken at their peaks and flecked with white foam.

“Can it hurt us?” Liddy asked.

“Not us.” Vow-of-Silence was reaching out at full length to pluck a set of linked tubes from a cabinet. “The Finder is safe at this depth and in this location. So is your ship, providing that it remains more than twenty meters down. I am sending a signal to it, warning of the storm. But the Angel ship will be in peril. It lies on the narrowest part of the shelf. When the storm arrives, shifts of sediment might send it over the edge into deep water. Waves could pick it up and smash it on the shore. The ship must be moved, or at the very least the Angel taken to safety. Let me see, three kilometers across the seabed, that would take …”