Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

“Well, dammit, I’m ahead of them.” The General was still scowling. “I want to know more than that. Maybe I’m simpleminded, Dr. Siry, and certainly I’m old, but I don’t give a tinker’s cuss about deuterium and time rates and all that science crap. The way I see it, we were sent here with a job to do. We had to find out what happened to the other expeditions that came before us. Well, we’ve done that, and more. Except for Friday Indigo, who it sounds like went off and killed himself in the storm, we have everybody from all the expeditions accounted for and here on this ship. So my question is this: How and when can we go home?”

“I’d like to know that, too, but you’re asking the wrong person.” Elke turned to Chan Dalton. “What’s the condition of the ship?”

“I’m not sure, but I suspect that it stinks.” Chan didn’t really want the attention on him. He had listened to Elke Siry with mixed feelings. On the one hand, what she said cleared up an awful lot of mysteries. On the other hand, the news that you’d been thrown into some different universe had all sorts of other implications. What else might be different here? Would a ship’s drive work, even if you could get it out of the water?

But first things first. He went on, “When we arrived we had to shed our external shielding to slow our descent. That worked and we were able to make a soft landing on the seabed, though apparently it smashed the pinnaces beyond repair. The whole ship isn’t in good shape, and I doubt it can ever make a Link transition. Many of our displays report abnormal status.” He nodded toward Bony. “The Bun’s the one to tell us what condition we’re in, and make the fix-ups if they can be made. Unless one of the other ships might be a better choice?”

“Forget it.” Bony didn’t know the condition of the Hero’s Return , but Chan’s question was still one that he could answer. “The Finder , the ship that Vow-of-Silence and Eager Seeker used to come here, was on its last legs when we left it. By now it’s a dead hulk. The Angel’s ship, the Minister of Grace , was swept into deep water by the storm, and we haven’t been able to contact it. And although we don’t know where Friday Indigo took the Mood Indigo , he hasn’t responded to any of our ships’ signals. His own ship is well made but it doesn’t have the structural strength of this one. If he went too deep, the hull would implode. Up near the surface, the storm might have smashed it to pieces.”

Chan nodded. “So it’s this ship, or nothing. How long will it be, Bun, before you can tell us where we stand?”

“Give me half a day and I’ll give you a first guess.” Bony hesitated. “Look, is it really this ship or nothing?”

“What other options do we have?”

“I’m not sure. But somebody made the Link entry point, here on Limbo. It’s a Link like none we’ve ever seen before, located at a sea-air interface instead of out in space. We know it wasn’t the bubble people who built it, they lack the technology. We know it wasn’t any member of the Stellar Group, because the whole design is different. But there is someone else on this planet, and they are land dwellers. Also, they have technology. When we were ashore, Liddy and I saw one of their flying machines.”

“Did you meet them?” Dag Korin asked.

“No. The aircraft flew over us, and gave no sign that it knew we were there. But if we can contact whoever made it, and if we can communicate with them, and if they are friendly and they will cooperate by lending us one of their machines and let us use it to travel through the Link entry point, then we won’t have to rely on this ship at all.”

Dag Korin raised shaggy white eyebrows. “Young man, do you realize how many conditions you just hung together in one sentence? But you’re quite right. We need more than one string to our bow, and if the only answer is to find and strong-arm another bunch of aliens to get ourselves home, that’s what we’ll do. You concentrate on the condition of the Hero’s Return , and the rest of us will think about ways to go ashore and meet the other aliens. One question, though. Do you have any idea whereabouts on land the other aliens might be?”

“No. But if they’re users of the Link, you’d expect them to have a base of operations not too far away from it. That means within maybe a hundred kilometers of where we are now.” Bony turned to Elke Siry. “You said something about orbiters that look down at the planet, as well as looking up at the sky.”

“Quite right. Two of them, launched as soon as storm conditions permitted. They’ve been returning images ever since, surveying the surface of the planet.”

“How good are their instruments? Would they see enough detail to pick out a town or a spaceport?”

“Easily. At their survey altitude they can observe something as small as twenty meters across.”

Dag Korin interrupted. “But they haven’t done it, have they? Doesn’t that suggest there’s no spaceport or settlement to be found on the surface?”

Elke Siry gave him a withering look. “Please, General. You should know better.” While the others waited for Dag Korin to explode, she calmly continued, “The orbiters are making survey observations and returning billions of bits of data a second to be stored in this ship’s data banks. But data are not the same as information . Before you can get the answers you want, you have to ask the right question.”

Dag Korin nodded meekly — confirming everyone’s view that the old General had a soft spot for Elke Siry. “And what, my dear, would the right question be?”

“We have to specify a description of what we mean by a settlement or a spaceport, and how it would look to the instruments on board the orbiters. And then we have to instruct the ship’s computer to go through all the data received from the orbiters, searching for matches to our description.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“But I would.” Elke leaned over the control panel in front of her. “To begin with, may I bring the ship’s computer in as a participant to the meeting? I need to specify a recognition template for settlements and spaceports, but I notice that the computer has not been present so far.”

“That’s my doing. I locked it out of control room activities, with instructions to interrupt only if there was immediate danger to the ship. Wait just a minute, though.” Dag Korin held up a hand and addressed the whole group. “I hate today’s womb-to-tomb style, in which every word you ever say can be dragged back and thrown in your face. Does anyone want to say something off the record? Remember, once the computer is in the loop, everything you say will go into the data banks.”

“I wish to speak.” Vow-of-Silence held up a thin forelimb. The Pipe-Rilla had so far been remarkably quiet. She stretched her long body forward, toward Dag Korin. “Sir, I am concerned about two things. First, the term `General.’ It was used several times by Dr. Siry in addressing you. Is that merely an honorific, or are you a `general’ in the military sense?”

Korin bristled. “Is there any other sense? What do you think I am, a general store? I’m a military general, and I’m proud of it.”

“Indeed. Then my second question has added weight. In discussing what should be done to make it possible for us to return home, you used the phrase, `strong-arm another bunch of aliens.’ Were you advocating the use of violence?”

“Hmm. Well, not exactly. I just meant—”

“Because if you had any such intention, I wish to make it clear that neither I, nor any other member of the Stellar Group, will sanction such action. There must be no violence. There are always better alternatives to violence.”