Charles Sheffield: Convergence

Nenda found himself staring at the display, wondering and waiting. The screen contained an image of the gas-giant planet, Gargantua. The atmosphere, with its smog of photo-dissociated organic compounds, showed as swirling bands of orange and umber. They glowed like high-quality zircon and hessonite, separated by thinner streaks and dots of blue-white ammonia clouds.

“I have arranged this as a time-lapse sequence of images, in order that you will see at once what took me many hours of observation to discern.” Atvar H’sial reached out a clawed forelimb, and the display began to move. Gargantua was rotating on its axis, the image speeded up so that the planet’s stately ten hours of revolution took less than a minute.

Louis watched, but found nothing to see. Just a stupid planet, turning on its axis as it had done for the past few hundred million years, and as it no doubt would for the next.

“Do you see it?” Atvar H’sial was hovering beside him.

“Of course I see it. D’you think I’ve gone blind?”

“I mean — do you see the change ?”

It took another whole revolution before Louis felt his breath catch in his throat. He had it at last. “The Eye!”

The Eye of Gargantua. The orange-red, atmospheric vortex that peered balefully out of the planet’s equatorial latitudes. A permanent circulation pattern, a giant whirlpool of frozen gases, a hurricane forty thousand kilometers across — sustained not by nature, but by the presence at its center of the vortex of a Builder transportation system.

“The Eye has gone!”

“It has indeed.” Atvar H’sial’s eyeless white head nodded her assent. “Vanished without a trace, even though it has been there for as long as humans have been in the Mandel system to observe it. And that inevitably sets up a train of thought. If the Builder transportation system on Gargantua has gone, then there seems a good chance that the entry point to that system, on the planetoid Glister, has likewise vanished. And indeed I can detect no trace of Glister at all, even with the ship’s most powerful detection devices. Now, since Glister has vanished—”

Nenda roared with rage. He was way ahead of her. Glister had gone. And his ship — the Have-It-All , the only thing that he owned — had been left on Glister.

The whole thing must be part of some scam that Atvar H’sial was trying to pull on him.

He dived at the Cecropian, and went in swinging.

Louis had been wrong about Atvar H’sial’s physical power. She was not four times as strong as he was. Ten times was more like it.

She held him effortlessly upside-down in her two front limbs, and hissed reprovingly — her echolocation equivalent of a rude gesture.

“To what end, Louis Nenda? And how ? Like you, I have been on this ship continuously since we rose from the surface of Genizee. Modesty is not a quality usually ascribed to me, but in this case I confess that cheating you in the way that you are thinking is beyond my powers — whether or not it might be beyond my desires. I say again, how could I make Glister and the Have-It-All disappear, while traveling from the Torvil Anfract?”

Louis had stopped struggling, except for breath. A Cecropian’s restraining hold was almost enough to crack a man’s ribs. It was just as well that pheromonal speech did not need the use of lungs.

“Okay, Okay. You can put me down now. Easy!” Too rapidly inverted, he staggered as his feet met the deck. “Look. Try to see it from my point of view. If the Have-It-All was your ship, and I came along and told you it had vanished away — wouldn’t you get angry, and do just what I did?”

“Anger, if it implies loss of control, is alien to a Cecropian. And given the disproportion of our sizes and strengths, it is well for you that I not respond as you did.”

“Sure. But you get my point.”

“As surely as you have missed mine. The loss of the Have-It-All is unfortunate, but the vanishing of the Builder transportation system is incomparably more significant. No longer can we hope to visit the artifact of Serenity, with the Builder riches that it contains. Even beyond that, my conviction that important changes continue to occur throughout the spiral arm remains unshaken. The events on and around Gargantua point more clearly than ever to the Builders as the agent of that change.”

“Don’t kid yourself, At. They’ve been gone at least three million years.”

“What goes, can return. Builder artifacts still dominate the spiral arm. We need the use of an expert on the Builders. I almost wish I could—”

“Could what?” Nenda had caught a hint of something hidden in the pheromones, a person’s name about to be revealed, and then just as hastily disguised.

“Nothing. But with the Eye of Gargantua gone, and Glister vanished, there seems little point in approaching closer to Gargantua itself. I wonder…”

The pheromones carried no word pattern. Louis Nenda saw instead the doublet worlds of Quake and Opal, spinning about each other.

“Want to go back there, At, take another look at Quake? Summertide’s a long time past; it’s probably real quiet now.”

“A landing, no. But a close approach might be… interesting.”

Atvar H’sial refused to say more as the Indulgence approached the doublet planet. Which left it to Louis Nenda to peer at the displays, and puzzle over what “interesting” might mean.

Quake and Opal were sister worlds, Quake just a fraction the smaller, spinning madly about each other. The closest points of their surfaces were only twelve thousand kilometers apart, their “day” was only eight hours long. But in everything except size, the two worlds were a study in contrasts: Opal, the water-world, had no land other than the floating soil-and-vegetation masses of the Slings; Quake, the desert world, was inimical to human life, shaken by great land tides at the doublet’s closest approach to the parent star, Mandel.

Stretching between the two, like a slender tower with bases on both worlds, was the Umbilical.

Nenda stared at the screen, and waited for the Umbilical to become visible. Its thread of silvery alloy was bright, but it was no more than forty meters across. The first part to come into view would surely be the Winch, located roughly midway.

Except that it wasn’t happening. Nenda had made the approach to Quake and Opal before. Last time, he had seen the Umbilical from much farther away.

Where was it?

He glanced at Atvar H’sial. She, intent on her own ultrasonic displays, was frozen at his side.

“I can’t see it, At. Can you?”

He thought at first that his message had gone unreceived. The reply, when it came, was diffuse and hesitant. “We do not see it, because it is not there. The Umbilical was also a Builder artifact. And it too has vanished. Quake and Opal are no longer connected.”

“What’s going on, At?”

“I do not know.”

“But, hell, you predicted this.”

“I expected a possible anomaly. But as to why …”

Nenda waited in vain for a continued message. As he did so, he caught the faintest hint of a name in the pheromonal emissions — the same name that had occurred before in Atvar H’sial’s thoughts, and had as rapidly been suppressed.

“Darya Lang!” Nenda shouted the words aloud, as well as sending them in a pheromonal flood. “I know where we can find her.”

Atvar H’sial froze rigid. “Why do you say that name?”

“Because you’ve been thinking it, and trying to keep it from me. Darya’s the arm’s top expert on the Builders. You know it. You think she’ll understand what’s going on.”

“I doubt that Darya Lang’s comprehension is better than my own.” But Atvar H’sial’s pheromonal words were soft-edged and unconvincing.