Charles Sheffield: Resurgence

Now the ship was a stripped-down hulk, a fleshless skeleton of a vessel barely able to support the life that travelled within it. Nonetheless, Louis Nenda whistled cheerfully as he sat in the ruined control cabin of the derelict and made final adjustments before Bose node entry.

“Louis, I sense a contradiction.” Atvar H’sial was crouched a couple of meters away on the bare metal floor. “To one who sees as I do, your vocal utterances are extremely ugly. Yet your pheromones display an uncommon happiness.”

“Sure I’m happy. Who wouldn’t be? We’re goin’ home.”

“This ship is a wreck.”

“It is. But we’re not dead. As long as you’re not dead, you can start over. Also, Julian Graves says that the inter-clade council will pay to restore the ship to the way it was.”

“Do you believe that?”

“ ’Course not. They’re a bunch of idiot bureaucrats. We’ll be lucky if we can squeeze two cents out of ’em. But the other side of that is, while they’re jawing about what fine people we are, only they don’t have any money to reward us, we’ll have things easy. They won’t be tryin’ to kill us off or stick us in jail. Graves says we’ll get some kind of award. Even Archimedes, for hangin’ outside the ship without a suit an’ draggin’ in Sinara and the other survival team members. Graves says he’s amazed that Archie didn’t die doin’ it.”

“You appear less confounded.”

“Hell, it takes more than that to kill a Zardalu. Archie keeps goin’ on about how he’s afraid I’ll disembowel him, but if I did it wouldn’t do him in. He’d just go ahead an’ grow another set of guts. Graves doesn’t know any of that, though, so Archie’s up for an award along with the rest of us.”

“Do not trust Ethical Councilors bearing gifts.”

“At, you’re gettin’ cynical. It don’t become you.” They had passed through the node, and Nenda stared with satisfaction at the view on his one remaining display. It revealed an almost total absence of stars. The ship was floating in the empty spaces of the Gulf. “We have a few hours to spare before the next node entry. Want to go hear what E.C. Tally has to offer? He’s been workin’ non-stop with the damaged beetleback, an’ Hans Rebka says there’ll be somethin’ worth hearin’.”

“It was always my impression that you disliked and distrusted Captain Rebka.”

“I do. But I never said he was an idiot. If what Tally has found out is good enough to interest Rebka, it’s probably worth a listen.”

“Do I detect admiration for Hans Rebka?”

“No.”

“Respect, then, which is separated from admiration by a thin olfactory boundary?”

“At, stop playin’ pheromonal word games. Let’s go.”

Nenda led the way along the ravaged upper corridor of the ship. Without circulation or temperature control equipment, the air was stale, hot, and humid. At the doorless entrance of the conference room, Louis paused and sniffed. Everyone on board was packed into the chamber. This was the way that hard-worked crew members should be. Sweaty, and smelly, and with clothes that could not be changed or washed for another couple of weeks.

Even the four survival team members looked right. The Have-It-All ’s stripped-down robodoc hadn’t been able to do much more than hold the status quo. Teri Dahl wore a body cast and was clearly paralyzed below the waist, Ben Blesh had a neck brace and his face was a swollen mass of purple-yellow blotches surrounding sunken bloodshot eyes, Torran Veck’s upper body was a mass of bandages, and Sinara Bellstock was relatively intact but had the expression of someone in need of about a year’s sleep. Instead of being neat and clean and fresh-faced and enthusiastic, each one was bedraggled and filthy. Louis could for the first time believe that the group might actually be earning its keep.

Archimedes was sprawled along one whole wall of the room. Nenda went to sit on the Zardalu’s meter-thick mid-section, and Kallik at once hurried over to crouch at his feet.

E.C. Tally was standing at the far end of the room, next to the captured beetleback. It had been in poor shape when it reached the Have-It-All , and recent treatment had done nothing to improve that. The dark ventral body plates had been ripped open along their center line and folded back. The interior was exposed, and parts of it had been removed.

It was now obvious to everyone what Atvar H’sial’s ultrasonic vision had seen at once. The recent evisceration had not killed the beetleback, because it had never been alive. Its innards were a tangle of wires, tubes, junction boxes, and hydraulics. When Nenda entered the room, E.C. Tally had just pulled out a valve. He was apparently in the middle of a lecture describing how the mechanism was constructed, and how it functioned. From the restless look of his audience, he had been at it for some time.

After three more minutes, Julian Graves said, “This is all very interesting, E.C. But some of us would rather hear what the beetlebacks did, rather than how they did it.”

“But these data are of great potential value.”

“I’m sure they are. So why don’t you download everything— later —into the Have-It-All ’s computer. Describe all that you have discovered about the way a beetleback is built and functions. But tell us, now, what you have learned about what the beetlebacks were doing, and why .”

“I have learned a great deal, and I conjecture even more. I will rank and present these findings in order of their estimated interest to this particular audience. First, regarding the beings who are extinguishing suns and removing all heat from them and their planets in a region of the Sag Arm: they are not, in their own terms, destroying these systems. They are rather, with the assistance of their own constructs, the beetlebacks, modifying star systems for their own use . The beetlebacks, much like Builder constructs, possess notions regarding their own creators that are of questionable validity. However, it seems clear that those creators require extremely cold temperatures if they are to survive and function. The name we have been using, Masters of Cold , appears entirely appropriate. It is my conjecture, although not that of the beetlebacks, that the Masters of Cold are some composite and sentient form of Bose-Einstein Condensates.”

Graves objected at once, “E.C., that is nonsense and you should know it. Bose-Einstein Condensates exist only with ambient temperatures within a few hundred billionths of a degree of absolute zero. No place in the natural universe is so cold.”

“Councilor, I of course do realize that.”

“So there is no possible way that the Masters of Cold could ever have developed in the first place.”

“They did not develop. Everything in the data bank of the beetlebacks points to a different origin. The Masters of Cold are themselves a creation —a creation of the Builders. They are a form of artifact.”

Tally’s audience had been listening quietly, but this was too much for Darya Lang. Sitting opposite Louis Nenda, she jumped to her feet and burst out, “E.C., that’s impossible. You were not on Iceworld with us, so you wouldn’t know this. But a Builder construct there assured us that the coming of extreme cold destroyed both that world and a complicated transportation system established by the Builders. It’s not reasonable to suggest that constructs which are themselves Builder creations would destroy Builder works.”

“I offer only the most probable answer, not a final one. The Masters of Cold are artifacts, created by the Builders. But they are constructs over which the Builders themselves have lost control .”