Charles Sheffield - Summertide

Rebka was saved from a reply by an angry voice ahead of them.

“I don’t know who to thank for this, and I’m not about to ask. But will someone get me the hell out of here! I have work to do.”

It was Darya Lang, fully conscious and struggling to free herself from the harness. She sounded nothing like the shy theoretical scientist who had first arrived on Opal, but her practical skills were still lacking. In her efforts to free herself she had managed to tangle the bindings, so that she was hanging upside down and could hardly move her arms.

“She’s all yours, Captain,” Graves said unexpectedly. “I’m going to find J’merlia and Kallik.” He popped down the hatchway at the side of the chamber and vanished from sight.

Rebka went across to Lang and studied the way the harness had been knotted. Less and less, he understood what was going on. With their escape from Quake, everyone except him should have been able to relax; instead, they all seemed to have new agendas of their own. Darya Lang sounded urgent and furious.

He reached out, tugged gently at one point of the harness and hard at another one. The result was gratifying. The bindings released completely to deposit Darya Lang lightly onto the chamber floor. He helped her to her feet and was rewarded with a surprising and embarrassed smile.

“Now why couldn’t I have done that?” She put pressure tentatively on her injured foot, shrugged, and pressed harder. “Last thing I remember, we’d just reached the Umbilical, and Graves and Kallik were fixing me up from the med kits. How long have I been asleep — and when do we reach Opal?”

“I don’t know how long you’ve been asleep, but it’s twenty-three hours since Summertide.” Rebka consulted his watch. “Make that closer to twenty-four. And we ought to touch down on Opal in a couple of hours. If we can touch down. They took a real beating there. There’s no rush, though. We have plenty of food and water on board. We can live in this capsule for weeks — even go back up the Umbilical to Midway Station if we have to, and stay there indefinitely.”

“No way.” Darya was shaking her head. “I can’t afford to wait. I’ve only been conscious for a few minutes, but I spent all of them cursing the man who filled me with drugs. We have to get down to the surface of Opal, and you have to get me a ship.”

“To go home? What’s the rush? Does anyone on Sentinel Gate know when you’ll be going back?”

“No one does.” She took Hans Rebka by the arm, leaning on him as they walked over to the capsule’s miniature galley. She sat down, taking her time as she poured herself a hot drink. Finally she turned to him. “But you have it wrong, Hans. I’m not going to Sentinel Gate. I’m going to Gargantua. And I’ll need help to get there.”

“I hope you’re not expecting it from me.” Rebka looked away, very conscious of her fingers on his biceps. “Look, I know that Nenda’s ship was dragged off there, and they were killed. But you don’t want to be killed, too. Gargantua is a gas-giant, a frozen world — we can’t live there; neither can the Cecropians.”

“I didn’t say that the ship and the sphere went right to Gargantua. I don’t think that. I believe the place I need to go is probably one of Gargantua’s moons. But I won’t know that until I get there.”

“Get there and do what? Recover a couple of corpses. Who cares what happens to their bodies? Atvar H’sial left you to die, and she and Nenda abandoned J’merlia and Kallik. Even if they were alive — and you say they’re not — they don’t deserve help.”

“I agree. And that’s not why I have to follow them.” Darya handed Rebka a cup. “Calm down, Hans. Drink that, and listen to me for a minute. I know that people from the Phemus Circle think everyone from the Alliance is a dreamy incompetent, just the way we think you’re all barbarian peasants who don’t bother to wash—”

“Huh!”

“But you and I have been around each other for a while now — long enough to know that those ideas are nonsense. You acknowledge that I’m at least a decent observer. I don’t make things up. So let me tell you what I saw , not what I think. Everyone else here may miss the point of this, but I trust you to draw the right conclusions.

“Remember now — listen first, then think , then react — not the other way round.” She moved closer to Rebka, positioning herself so that it was difficult for him to do anything other than listen to her.

“When we came up out of the clouds on Quake, you were too busy piloting the ship to look behind, and everyone else in the rear compartment was blinded by Mandel and Amaranth. So no one else saw what I saw: Quake opening, deep into the interior. And two objects coming out. One of them flew away, out of the plane of the galaxy. I lost sight of it in less than a second. You saw the other one. It took off toward Gargantua, and Louis Nenda’s ship was carried with it. That was significant, but it isn’t the important point! Everyone said that Quake was far too quiet for so close to Summertide. Sure, I know we thought it was violent, when we were down there. But it wasn’t. Max Perry kept saying it: Where’s all the energy going?

“Well, we know the answer to that now. It was being transformed and stored, so that when the right time came the whole interior of Quake could open up and eject those two bodies — spaceships, if you think they were that.

“I saw it happen, and I caught the sniff of an answer to something that had kept me baffled for months, long before I left Sentinel Gate:

“Why Dobelle?

“Why such a nothing place, I mean, for such an important event?

“The idea of visiting Dobelle occurred to me when I calculated the convergence time and place for influences spreading out from all the artifacts. There was a unique solution: Quake at Summertide. But when I proposed that, the Builder specialists in the Alliance laughed at me. They said, look, Darya, we accept that there is an artifact in the Dobelle system — the Umbilical. But it’s a minor piece of Builder technology. Something we understand; something that isn’t mysterious or big or complex. It makes no sense for the focus of all the Builder activities to be at such a second-class structure, in such a worthless and unimportant part of the Galaxy — I’m sorry, Hans, but I’m quoting, and that’s the way people in the Alliance regard the worlds of the Phemus Circle.”

Rebka shrugged. “Don’t apologize,” he said gruffly. “That’s the way a lot of us think about the Circle worlds, and we live here. Try a weekend on Teufel, sometime — if you can stand it.”

“Well, whatever they said about the Phemus Circle and the Umbilical, they couldn’t argue with the statistical analysis. In fact, they repeated it for themselves and found that everything did point to Dobelle, and to Quake at Summertide. They had to agree with me. The trouble was, I was forced to agree with them . Dobelle made no sense as a place for important action. I mean, I was the one who had written the Catalog description of the Umbilical — ‘one of the simplest and most comprehensible of all Builder artifacts’! People were parroting back my own words.

“So I was baffled when I arrived here. I was still baffled when you flew us up through the clouds, trying to get off Quake in one piece. I couldn’t make sense of Dobelle as the convergence point.

“But then I saw that pulsing light beam shine down from Gargantua and watched the whole of Quake opening up in front of me. And just before I passed out I realized that we had all been missing something obvious.

“All the references on the structure of the galaxy make the same comment, the Dobelle system is ‘one of the natural wonders of the local spiral arm.’ Isn’t it wonderful, the books say, how the interplay of the gravitational fields of Amaranth and Mandel and Gargantua has thrown Dobelle into such a finely balanced orbit — an orbit so placed that once every three hundred and fifty thousand years, all the players line up exactly for Summertide and the Grand Conjunction. Isn’t that just amazing?