Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

“Then what is your explanation for the existence of Bridle Gap?”

“Nothing to make you feel comfortable. Bridle Gap was moved here by the Zardalu, when they controlled this whole region. The Zardalu had great powers when humans were still swinging in the trees — just another reason to worry about them now.” He began to move forward. “Wherever it came from, the planet must have had natural high-radiation life-forms. You’ll see them for yourself in a couple of hours, because it looks like we’re ready to go.”

Louis Nenda had appeared from within the seedship’s hatch. “Tight squeeze,” he said. “And goin’ to be rough when we get down there. Sure one of you don’t want to stay with the rest?”

Rebka ignored the invitation to remain behind and pushed E.C. Tally on ahead of him into the seedship’s interior. With Atvar H’sial already inside, it was a tight fit. The seed, full-grown, was a disappointment. The hope had been for a sizable lifeboat, capable of carrying a substantial fraction of the Erebus ’s total passenger capacity. Instead the final seedship proved to be a midget: puny engines, no Bose Drive, and only enough room to squeeze in four or five people. The landing party had been whittled down: Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial, most familiar with Zardalu Communion territory and customs; E.C. Tally, to provide an exact visual and sound record of what happened on the surface, to be played back for the others who stayed on board the Erebus ; and finally Hans Rebka, for the good — but unmentioned — reason that somebody less naive than E.C. Tally was needed to keep an eye on Nenda and Atvar H’sial.

The group remaining on the Erebus had been assigned one unrewarding but necessary task: to learn all that could be learned about the Torvil Anfract.

The planet that the seedship drifted down to was at its best from a distance. Two hundred miles up, the surface was a smoky palette of soft purple and gray. By two thousand feet that soft, airbrushed texture had resolved to a jumbled wilderness of broken, steep-sided cliffs, their faces covered with spiky gray trees and shrubs. The landing port for Bridle Gap occupied half of an isolated long, fat gash on the surface, with a dark body of water at its lower end. Louis Nenda took the ship down with total confidence and landed at the water’s edge.

“That’ll do. Cross your fingers and claws. We’ll know in another five minutes if Dulcimer’s here.” He was already smearing thick yellow cream over his face and hands.

“Five minutes?” E.C. Tally said. “But what about the time it takes to clear customs and Immigration?”

Nenda gave him one incredulous stare and continued applying the cream. “Better get coated, too, ’less you wanna crisp out there in two seconds.” He went to the hatch, cracked it open and sniffed, then fitted improvised goggles into position. “Not bad. I’m goin’. Follow me as soon as you’re ready.”

Hans Rebka was right behind as Nenda stepped out onto the surface.

He gazed all around and made his own evaluation. He had never been to this particular planet, but he had seen a dozen that rivaled it. Bridle Gap was bad, and one would never go outside at noon, but it was no worse than his birthworld of Teufel, where no one who wanted to live went out while the Remouleur dawn wind blew.

He looked east through his goggles, to where Cavesson’s morning rays were barely clearing the jagged upthrust fingers of the cliffs. The sun’s bright point was diffused by the atmosphere, and the breeze on his face was actually chilly. He knew better than to be misled by either of those. Even thinned by dust and cloud and ozone, Cavesson was delivering to the surface of Bridle Gap a hundred times as much UV as a human’s eyes and skin could tolerate. The air smelled like a continuous electrical discharge. The flowers on the vegetation at water’s edge confirmed the deadly surroundings. Drab gray and sable to Rebka’s vision, they would glow and dazzle out in the ultraviolet, where the tiny winged pollinators of Bridle Gap saw most clearly.

It was also a low-gravity world, well-suited to Atvar H’sial’s physiology. While Rebka was still staring around, the Cecropian floated past him in a gliding leap that carried her to Louis Nenda’s side. He had reached a long, low building built partly on the spaceport’s rocky surface and partly in the black water beyond it. Together, the Cecropian and the Karelian human waded through shallow water to reach the entrance to the Sun Bar.

Hans Rebka took a quick glance back at the seedship. There was still no sign of E.C. Tally, but it would be a mistake to let Nenda and Atvar H’sial begin a meeting alone. Rebka had heard their explanation of what they had been doing on Serenity that led to their expulsion and return to the spiral arm. He did not believe a word of it.

He splashed forward, entered a dark doorway of solid obsidian, and took off his goggles to find himself confronted by a waist-high circle of bright black eyes.

The neurotoxic sting of a Hymenopt was deadly, and the chance that this one understood human speech was small. Rebka pointed to the backs of Nenda and Atvar H’sial, visible through another stone doorway, and walked steadily that way without speaking. He followed them through three more interior rooms, then set his goggles in position again as he emerged into a chamber that was open to the glaring sky, with a ledge of rock across its full width, ending at oily black water.

A dozen creatures of all shapes and sizes lay on the ledge, soaking in Cavesson’s lethal rays. Louis Nenda advanced to speak to one of them. After a few seconds it rose to balance on its thick tail and came wriggling back into the covered part of the room.

“Hello there.” The voice was a croaking growl. The blubbery green lips of a broad mouth pursed into an awful imitation of a human smile. “Honored to meet you, sirs. Excuse my bare condition, but I was just having myself a bit of a wallowbake. Dulcimer, Master Pilot, at your service.”

Rebka had never met a Chism Polypheme, but he had seen too many aliens to consider this one as anything more than a variation on a theme, one who happened to lack both radial and bilateral symmetry. The alien was a nine-foot helical cylinder, a corkscrew of smooth muscle covered with rubbery green skin and topped by a head the same width as the body. A huge eye of slaty gray, shifty and bulging, leered out from under a scaly browridge. The lidded ocular was half as wide as the head itself. Between that and the pouting mouth, the tiny gold-rimmed pea of a scanning eye continuously flickered across the scene. As Rebka watched, five flexible three-fingered limbs, all on one side of the pliant body and each just long enough to reach across it, picked up a corsetlike pink garment from the ledge, wrapped it around the Polypheme’s middle, and hooked it in place. The five arms poked through five holes, to lodge comfortably into broad lateral slings on the corset. The alien tightened its corkscrew body and crouched lower onto the massive, coiled tail to match Rebka’s height.

“At your service,” the croaking voice repeated. The scanning eye on its short eyestalk roved the room, then returned to stare uneasily at the towering blind form of Atvar H’sial, twice the size of the humans. “Cecropian, eh. Don’t see too many of you in these parts. You’re needing a top pilot, do you say?”

Atvar H’sial did not move a millimeter. “We are,” Rebka said.

“Then you need look no farther.” The main eye turned to Rebka. “I’ve guided ten thousand missions, every one a success. I know the galaxy better than any living being, probably better than any dead one, too. Though I say it myself, you couldn’t have better luck than getting me as your pilot.”