Charles Sheffield: Divergence

By contrast, the Phemus Circle consists of just a score of impoverished worlds, ninety percent human, nestled near the part of the Fourth Alliance closest to the center of the galaxy. The Phemus Circle shares a region where the Fourth Alliance, the Cecropia Federation, and the Zardalu Communion all have overlapping territories. It is a measure of the poverty of this group that none of the larger neighbors has shown interest in developing the Phemus Circle, although the Circle is nominally under the control of the Fourth Alliance and recognizes the authority of the Alliance’s Council members.

The humans of the Zardalu Communion recognize no central authority. In consequence, their numbers and distribution are difficult. Efrarezi and Camefil estimate that no more than twelve percent of all Zardalu intelligent forms are human. Of these, almost one half live close to the disputed borders with the Fourth Alliance and the Cecropia Federation. The number of worlds inhabited by humans in the region of the Zardalu Communion is unknown.

Physical Characteristics: Humans are land-dwelling vertebrate bisexual quadrupeds possessing bilateral symmetry and a well-marked head and torso. The extremities of the upper limb pair have been modified to permit grasping. All sensory apparatus has low performance and is especially poor for smell and taste. The grelatory organ is entirely absent.

The human form is receptive to modification and augmentation, with a high tolerance of alien tissues. The mutation rate is the highest of any known intelligent species, but this does not seem to be an evolutionary advantage.

History: The origin of the human clade is the planet Earth, which with its sun, Sol, marks the center of the reference-coordinate system employed in this catalog. Human history extends for approximately ten thousand years before the Expansion, with written records available for roughly half that time. Unfortunately, the human tendency for self-delusion, self-aggrandizement, and baseless faith in human superiority over all other intelligent life-forms renders much of the written record unreliable. Serious research workers are advised to seek alternative primary data sources concerning humans.

Culture: Human culture is built around four basic elements: sexual relationships, territorial rights, individual intellectual dominance, and desire for group acceptance. The H’sirin model using just these four traits as independent variables enables accurate prediction of human behavior patterns. On the basis of this, human culture is judged to be of Level Two, with few prospects for advancement to a higher level.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

To Birdie Kelly, squelching through the juicy dark mud of the Sling with a food tray balanced in front of him and a message flimsy stuck between the grimy fingers of his right hand, that thought came with the force and freshness of revelation.

One damned thing after another! he repeated to himself. No sooner was his boss, Max Perry, shipped off to the hospital for a couple of weeks of rehab surgery than Birdie found himself nursemaiding an Alliance councilor, no less, from far-off Miranda. Perry had been hard to take, with his obsessive need to work and his fixation about visits to Quake, but Julius Graves was no easier. Worse, in some ways, sitting there talking to himself when he should have been on his way back to Miranda weeks before. There he remained, day after day, loafing about indoors and not lifting a finger to help with the reconstruction work, and all the while ignoring recall messages from his own superiors. He seemed ready to stay forever.

Even so…

Birdie paused at the entrance to the building and took a deep breath of damp sea air.

Even so, it was impossible to feel anything other than elated these days. Birdie stared up at the dappled blue sky with Mandel’s golden disk showing through broken cloud, then around him at the torn vegetation pushing out new shoots from broken stems. A light breeze roamed in from the west, signaling a perfect day for sailing. He loved it all, and it all seemed too good to be true. Summertide was over, the surface of Opal was returning to its usual tranquility, and Birdie had survived . That was more than could be said for half the unfortunate population of the waterworld.

It was more than he had expected for himself. One week earlier, as Summertide reached its climax and the gravity fields of Mandel and Amaranth tore at Opal, Birdie had huddled alone in the prow of a small boat and watched the turbulent surface ahead of him veer from horizontal to near-vertical.

He was a goner and he knew it. Radio signals had warned that the monster was on the way. Tidal forces had created a great soliton, a solitary wave over a kilometer high that was sweeping around the whole girth of Opal. Sling after Sling had sent their last messages, reporting on wave speed and height before the huge but fragile rafts of mud and tangled vegetation were torn apart and fell silent.

There was no way to avoid it. Birdie had crouched in the bottom of the boat, clutching the bottom boards with white-knuckled hands.

The boat’s prow tilted up. Thirty degrees, forty-five, sixty. Horizontal and vertical switched roles. Birdie found himself with his feet braced on the boat’s stern, his hands holding tight to the centerboard and the little mast. He was lifted, with a two- or three-gee force on his body that went on and on, like a launch from Starside Port to orbit. Rushing water flew past, spray two feet from his nose. For half a minute he was carried up and up, a flyspeck on a wall of ocean, up into Opal’s dark clouds. He poised there, forever, unable to see anything as the boat leveled off. At last came the fall, leaving his stomach behind on the downward plunge.

He had been permitted one breathtaking view as they dropped out of the clouds: Opal’s seabed lay ahead, exposed by millennial tides, dotted with long-sunken ships and the vast green bodies of stranded Dowsers, unbuoyed by water and crushed by their own multimillion-ton weight. Then he was swooping down a long, foam-flecked slope, toward that muddy wasteland. He knew, even more certainly than before, that he was about to die.

A second, smaller wave, running crosswise to the first, saved him. Before he could be smashed onto the unforgiving seabed, there was a scream of wind and a harsh slap on the boat’s rugged stern. He found himself being lifted again in a boiling torrent of warm spray, holding harder than ever, almost unable to breathe. But breathe he did, and held on, too, an hour longer than he would have believed humanly possible, until Summertide was past and the tough little boat had been tossed to calmer waters.

It was something to tell his grandchildren about — if he ever got around to having any.

He had not intended to, but now he might. Only weeks after Summertide, and the social pressure was already on. Every fertile woman would be pregnant within the next month, pushing Opal’s population back toward survival level.

Birdie looked up at the calm blue sky and drew in another long, reassuring breath. Perhaps the real miracle was not that he had lived to tell the tale, but that his story seemed to have been repeated again and again across the entire surface of Opal. Some of the Slings, caught in contrary crosscurrents, had been held together by watery whirlpools when all logic suggested they should have been torn apart. Survivors told of flotsam that had come within reach just as their own strength was failing.

Or maybe they had it backward. Birdie had a new insight. Maybe they had hung on, like him, for exactly as long as was necessary until a means of self-preservation came to hand. People who lived in the Dobelle system did not give in easily. They could not afford to.