Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

On the easels hung four objects. They seemed oddly two-dimensional, but that was because they had been dried, carefully opened and dissected, and pinned flat.

Friday was staring at the desiccated remains of four bubble people.

Bony had been very young when the quarantine was imposed, and in his childhood he had absorbed the widespread human bias against other members of the Stellar Group. Pipe-Rillas were hopeless cowards. Tinkers were unstable. Angels were enormously intelligent, but they were also obstinate, complaining, and inscrutable. It was an outrage that such flawed and inferior beings should control access to the stars, while denying it by quarantine to superior humans.

Perhaps; but when you were stranded on the seabed of an alien world with a major storm raging overhead, a limited air supply, and no idea what to do next, you became aware of other alien qualities.

Vow-of-Silence was crouching in the silt-filled water with the Angel cradled in two of her fore-limbs and an amorphous mass of Tinkers heaped by her side. As Bony and Liddy came up to her, the Pipe-Rilla bobbed her head toward the humans and said, “There is a slight difficulty. Although the Finder is no more than two or three kilometers away, the storm has so filled the water around us with suspended sediments that earlier sea-markers are invisible. Also, night approaches. We do not know in which direction we should proceed to reach our ship. Do you?”

For a coward the Pipe-Rilla sounded remarkably calm — much calmer than Bony felt. He looked at Liddy. She shrugged, and said to Vow-of-Silence, “I’m afraid we don’t.”

Bony felt like an idiot — setting a beacon for your return path should be second nature to anyone who claimed technical competence. The Angel said, “ ‘ Full fathom five, thy Finder lies,’ ” which didn’t seem to help at all.

Vow-of-Silence said, “Very good. Eager Seeker, I’m sorry to trouble you. If you wouldn’t mind?”

Eager Seeker offered no reply, but the whole heap of the Tinker Composite disassembled, rose, and circled briefly like an underwater tornado. Then the components streaked away in all directions.

Bony said, “What?” but Liddy’s nudge saved him from making a bigger fool of himself. After a couple of minutes the Angel added, “ ‘ They also serve who only stand and wait.’ ” Five minutes later the Tinker components came streaming back. They merged to make a tall column, held there for maybe ten seconds, then reformed to create a horizontal line that snaked away into the murk.

“Thank you, Eager Seeker.” Vow-of-Silence gestured to Bony and Liddy with one of her fore-limbs. “After you.”

“How could the Tinker understand that?” Liddy asked Bony, as they followed the strung-out line of components. “I thought they had no intelligence unless they were formed into a Composite.”

She spoke softly, but Vow-of-Silence heard her. “Indeed they do not.” The Pipe-Rilla with her Angel burden was close behind. As she moved to Bony’s side, the individual components in the line of Tinkers behind her coalesced into a rough sphere.

“My reply was formal politeness,” Vow-of-Silence went on, “and no more than that. I will repeat our expression of gratitude when we reach the ship, and Eager Seeker is once more fully assembled into a higher consciousness.”

The Angel said nothing. The blue-green fronds were furled about the upper body, and to Bony’s eye the resemblance to a large vegetable became complete.

The little party trudged on across the seafloor as twilight edged toward night. Flickers of lightning, faint and far-off, picked out the guiding column of Tinkers. It seemed far more than three kilometers when the rococo outline of the toppled Finder at last appeared.

Bony was too tired to do more than struggle aboard, remove his suit, and find a place to lie down on a cluttered floor that was actually a wall. After a few seconds Liddy came to curl up beside him. She snuggled close but said not a word. Bony was left to reflect that this was an adolescent’s dream. He was spending the night with a woman who had been trained in the Leah Rainbow Academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk, a woman who had been trained to please men in a hundred different ways. A woman, moreover, who seemed to like him and had told him that he was attractive.

Bony sighed. If Liddy knew a hundred ways to delight, Life knew a thousand ways to disappoint. Nothing was going to happen tonight.

He put a protective arm over her. In the few moments before he went to sleep he decided that human judgment was wrong. Pipe-Rillas were brave, not cowardly. Tinkers were not unstable, but steady and reliable. Only the Angels appeared to match their reputation. His final memory was of a synthesizer voice, grumbling from a dark corner: “Standing without the touch of soil, bare-rooted and bereft of light. `How are the mighty fallen!’ ”

Hunger woke Bony. He lay in darkness and could not recall when he had last eaten. His stomach was growling like a wild beast.

He reached out and found Liddy gone. He opened his eyes, and the Angel’s corner stood empty. Over to his right, the port showed the first faintest glint of dawn. Off to his left, toward the ship’s bow, he saw a brighter light and heard the sound of voices.

He rubbed tired eyes, stood up, and headed to the adjoining chamber. They were all there. The Angel stood directly beneath a glowing tube, its lower part in a container filled with dark liquid. Eager Seeker had assembled its components into a fat ring around the Angel’s bulky middle section. As Bony came in, Liddy — wonderful mind-reader Liddy — handed him a white half-moon with a crumbly texture and said, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not bad and it’s supposed to be suited to a human digestion.”

Bony took a big bite, nodded his thanks, and joined the others in staring at the Pipe-Rilla. Vow-of-Silence was crouched by the main control desk of the Finder , and she was shaking her narrow head. “We have a status report on the condition of this ship, which is not good. We also have other surprising news. I have called for an oral summary.” Vow-of-Silence bowed to Bony and Liddy. “Recognizing your limitations, it will be provided in your form of speech.”

In spite of the polite gesture the final comment was, at the very least, a dig at humans. Pipe-Rillas and Tinker Composites had no difficulty picking up in a few weeks everything from Swahili to Sioux, while less than a hundred human interpreters had mastered the alien languages. As for the native tongue of the tongueless Angels, even the Tinkers and Pipe-Rillas said it was next to impossible.

Even so, Bony wondered if this was going to work. The onboard computer of the Finder was probably as good as the Pipe-Rillas could make, but in this area of technology nothing in the Stellar Group came close to human products. Sure enough, the voice that came from the cabin address system had a labored, mechanical quality, with odd breaks between words.

THERE HAS BEEN A CONTINUED STEADY DETERIORATION IN THIS SHIP’S ENERGY SUPPLY AND STORAGE SYSTEMS. ONE STORAGE ELEMENT SUFFERED MAJOR DAMAGE UPON EMERGING FROM THE LINK INTO WATER, AND IT CANNOT BE USED. THE MINOR HULL FRACTURE EXPERIENCED AT THAT SAME TIME HAS BEEN COMPENSATED THROUGH THE USE OF A SEPARATING FIELD, BUT SUCH A FIELD REQUIRES A SUBSTANTIAL AND CONTINUOUS EXPENDITURE OF ENERGY. THAT ENERGY CANNOT BE REPLACED, NOR CAN REPAIRS BE MADE, UNTIL THE SHIP IS NO LONGER IMMERSED IN A DENSE SURROUNDING MEDIUM. TRANSFER OF THE SHIP TO ITS DESIGNED VACUUM ENVIRONMENT MUST OCCUR WITHIN THREE DAYS, OTHERWISE PRESENT LEVELS OF LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEMS CANNOT BE MAINTAINED.