Resurgence (36 page)

There was also an
impression
, and Tally could put it no more strongly than that, that the beetleback activity level was increasing rapidly. It seemed to lead to something with no physical meaning: a singularity. Although a singularity could not exist in the real universe, one might exist in the universe as perceived by the beetlebacks. Suppose, for example, that at some point they themselves ceased to function?

Tally looked around the cabin. He felt that he had achieved an important if imperfect breakthrough. But to whom could he express it? Sinara and Claudius were sound asleep. However, the pinnace was not flying on autopilot. Louis Nenda was—let us hope!—still conscious.

"May I speak?"

Nenda turned a fraction in his seat. "You know, normally when I hear you say that, I grit my teeth. But there's so much nothin' goin' on around here, I can use a change. What you got?"

"A partial understanding, perhaps, of beetleback nature and purpose."

Tally summarized his findings, collapsing the results of quadrillions of data sorts, merges, and compressions into a five-minute description. He expected skepticism. His conclusion was admittedly radical. But Nenda merely said, "Give me a second. I want to make sure this gets through loud and clear to Atvar H'sial."

The silence that followed was far more than a second. Tally assumed that some considerable pheromonal discussion was going on between human and Cecropian.

Finally, Nenda said, "At thinks you've nailed it on the button. Your buddies are one small piece of a much bigger operation, and when that's done they'll be history. At believes the Big Chill is on the way. The sun will go out and Marglot will become the ultimate icebox. Does that make sense in terms of what the bugs have been sayin' to each other?"

"I do not know." For the first time since his original embodiment, E.C. felt that the speed of his mental processes was inadequate. First he needed to frame Atvar H'sial's hypothesis in strictly logical terms, then he must evaluate its consistency in terms of the entire mass of beetleback recorded data. "The question is difficult. The necessary analysis may take hours."

"Well, hours is what we've got. About three more of 'em, is my guess, before we touch down near the suit beacons. Go to it, E.C. Oh, an' Atvar H'sial says there's one thing we need to know in particular."

"Ask, and I will seek to determine it."

"It's a simple question: If there's goin' to be a big freeze, how long until the action starts? When is Showtime?"

Help needed from the
Have-It-All.
 

Hans Rebka had trained himself to sleep at almost any place and any time. That talent, however, was not an asset in times of danger. Then you normally slept little, if at all.

But when were you in danger? Sometimes common sense said one thing, while a part of your suspicious hindbrain declined to agree. Inside the cone-house everything was quiet. Outside, the rain had ended and the wind died away. With no animal life, large or small, night on Marglot should be both silent and safe.

That certainly seemed to be the opinion of the rest of the party. Hans, with the headlight of his suit reduced to the faintest glimmer, moved quietly from figure to still figure. Torran Veck—Julian Graves—Darya Lang—Teri Dahl—Ben Blesh—all were asleep, though now and again Ben would murmur something unintelligible.

So why was Hans awake? The sound when it came was at first no louder than the rustle of wind across tall grass. It seemed like imagination, until as it strengthened Hans heard a rhythmic undertone. That was the noise of the engine of a ground or air vehicle—and it was approaching.

Hans went to Darya and shook her.

"Best if we're awake, I think." And then, when she stared at him as though she had never seen him before, "Help me rouse the others. Visitors are on the way."

She blinked up at him. "Can't be. We're the only ones on the planet."

"Not anymore. Trust me." Hans moved on, to shake Julian Graves awake. By the time everyone was sitting up there could no longer be any doubt about the sound outside.

"Best if most of you stay where we are. I'll take a look." Hans expected opposition, but the others were still hardly more than half awake. He slipped out, pushing aside the thick leaf layers.

The night was unexpectedly cold. It was also cloudy. Was the area around the Hot Pole ever anything but cloudy?

He walked around the cone-house in time to see a pinnace making a soft landing about fifty meters away.

Smart thinking. Whoever was flying it had homed in on the suit beacons and knew that they were in the cone-house. But the pilot wouldn't know who else or what else might be inside with them. Rebka walked toward the ship. When the hatch opened and the figure who emerged was Louis Nenda, somehow that was no surprise at all.

The cone-house was big enough, even for eleven. After the excited—and bewildered—greetings, comparisons began.

Comparisons, because you could hardly call them explanations. Each group in turn told what had happened after leaving the
Pride of Orion
and described how they came to be on Marglot. Julian Graves was the last to speak. Long before he was done, Louis Nenda was wriggling and fidgeting where he sat. He raised his eyebrows at Hans Rebka.

Hans waited for Graves's final words, then said to Nenda, "I agree. You're right."

"Right? I'm more than right. I'm damned right, and this is all wrong." And, when the others stared at Nenda, "Don't you see it, any of you except Rebka?"

Hans said, "They don't. We have to explain." He turned to the rest. "There's such a thing as coincidence, but this goes beyond it. Look at the facts. Every group went in different directions and did totally different things. But here we are on Marglot, all of us."

"Not all of us." Ben spoke softly. "Lara isn't here. That was my fault."

"No." Darya turned to him. "It was my fault. I was the one who insisted on going to Iceworld."

Rebka said, "It was Lara's own fault—she deliberately disobeyed Ben's order. Anyway, we've already been over that ten times. We have to focus on today. How did it happen that we all arrived here, like magic?"

"
Just
like magic." Nenda snorted. "Let me tell you somethin'. When I was younger and even dumber than I am now, I wasted lots of time in the Eyecatch Gallery on Scordato. I studied the gamblin' games, an' finally I found one I liked. I watched it played, figured I couldn't lose. Twenty buttons, and twenty different colors that could come up on a screen. The color for any button changed randomly with each play. You paid for ten tries. If on any try you pressed your button and the screen came up yellow, you were sunk—out of the game. Otherwise you kept goin'. Make it all the way, an' you won double your original stake. I worked out the odds. You had nineteen chances out of twenty that you'd make it through any one try, so you had nearly a six out of ten chance—Tally will confirm this—of makin' it through all ten. That was better than evens of winnin'. So I paid my stake, an' I played. I hit green and purple and orange and black, all the way through to my tenth play. Then I pushed a button one last time, an' the screen came up yellow. What I hadn't known was that the game was rigged. If you made it as far as the tenth play, you got yellow no matter what button you pushed."

The others stared at Nenda as though he had switched to some alien language, until Hans Rebka said, "Like the system we found ourselves in when we reached the Sag Arm. It was rigged. No matter what route you took from the
Pride of Orion
, or what method you tried, the screen finally came up yellow—you were shipped here."

Nenda added, "All roads lead to Marglot. I bet there's a thousand more buttons in that system that nobody tried. Me an' At, we did it the hard way. Off through the Bose Network to Pleasureworld, then all the way to Pompadour. But we didn't need to. We could have closed our eyes, pushed any button, and finished up in a transport vortex that would bring us
here
."

"Here," Darya Lang said, "where the animals are already dead. Here, where all other life on the planet is going to die. If Tally and Atvar H'sial are correct,
here
is a place where everything is doomed, even the sun itself. Why bring us here, just so we can die?" She turned to Nenda. "You say you and Atvar H'sial are the stupid ones, but you came here in a ship. And the reason you have that ship is because you
didn't
arrive using a transport vortex. If it weren't for you, we would have no way to escape."

"Minor correction. It's a
pinnace
, not a ship. An' with all you lot"—Nenda counted—"we'd never cram you in. Even if we piled you three deep, we wouldn't get off the ground. Either it's half a dozen trips to orbit, which would really be pushing the pinnace, or else the
Have-It-All
has to come down. Which I hate like hell to do, because that's my last card."

"But if E.C. Tally is right, we will be forced to seek such an escape. And yet—and yet—" Julian Graves sat with his hand hooding his eyes. "Logic is not my strong point, but I am confused. The Builders brought us here. I accept that. I can even accept that they were not aware of our mortal weakness, and expected that we would find a way to survive. But why not bring us here directly? Why have us travel first to a dead system?"

Darya said, "So we could see it. Would you ever have believed that a stellar system could die like that, if you hadn't been there and seen it for yourself? I wouldn't. The Builders wanted us to know that a whole system
could
die, before we were brought to one that is dying."

"But if the Builders destroyed the other system—" Teri Dahl began.

"They didn't. It was the others—the Destroyers—who did it."

"The Destroyers, the Voiders," Torran Veck said. "Sure. If everything doesn't work out with one race of super-beings, invent another. Professor Lang, if you can't make sense—"

"Save the bickering for later." Julian Graves cut him off. "I make no claims as to my performance, which has so far been pathetic; but I am still the leader of this expedition. It is my conclusion that Professor Lang is right. We were brought to the Sag Arm for a purpose. That purpose is to see what
has
happened, to understand what
can
happen, and to take that knowledge back with us to the Orion Arm. Whatever causes this, we must find a way to stop it—not only for the sake of beings in this arm, for our own home clades." He turned to Nenda. "I am assuming that the
Have-It-All
is still somewhere in orbit?"

"Sure it is. One yell from me and J'merlia can bring it here. But I won't do that 'til we have to, because the
Have-It-All
is my only ticket home."

"That is a policy both wise and practical. Also, we should learn as much as possible before we leave Marglot. However, for my own peace of mind I would like you to do one thing. Please contact your crew on the
Have-It-All
and confirm that they are in a position to land here on Marglot, if necessary at short notice."

"I'll do it—though I'll tell you right now, the idea of this lot clutterin' up the inside of my ship don't exactly thrill me. I'll call from the pinnace. It has better transmission equipment than the suits, an' there are channels that Kallik will be sure to have open. Take me a few minutes."

He moved to the multiple overlapping leaf layers that formed the wall of the cone-house. As he pulled the inner layer aside, Hans Rebka was somehow standing next to him.

Nenda paused with his hand on the side of the leaf. He said, softly enough so that Rebka alone could hear, "I don't remember anybody invitin' you."

"I invited myself." Rebka motioned Nenda to continue beyond the inner layer. When they were standing in the narrow space between the leaves, he went on, "Look, I know what I think of you, and I can guess that you don't think any better of me. But we are both realists. Like it or not, Julian Graves is in charge of this expedition and the others will do what he says."

"Yeah. Old numb-nuts, the Ethical Councilor. He never met an alien he didn't like, even when it was tryin' to kill him."

"I don't think anyone but you and me realizes how much danger we could be in—maybe Atvar H'sial, because the two of you seem to be on the same wavelength. Anyway, I've got an itch inside that I can't scratch, and it feels like trouble."

"Yeah. But we don't know when an' how." Nenda whistled through his teeth. "All right. I hate to say this, but I'll go along. We work together, 'til we're out of this crappy place an' home in the Orion Arm. Then it's back to business as usual."

"Some business there I can do without. I was twelve hours away from execution when an inter-clade councilor arrived to take me to Miranda. Now I feel like I'm waiting to be executed on Marglot." Rebka pushed his way through the remaining leaves until he was outside the cone-house. There he paused until Louis Nenda joined him. Rebka went on, "Seems like our worries are justified. What do you make of this?"

The two men stared at the ground, then looked up to the clouded sky. Here at the Hot Pole, perpetually warmed by the hot gas-giant around which Marglot orbited, an impossible event was taking place.

All around, large flakes of white drifted down.

It was snowing.

"Want to go back an' tell 'em the news?" Nenda jerked his head toward the cone-house.

"I think you should make your call to the
Have-It-All
first. Let's see what else we can learn."

"Yeah. Graves will start cluckin' an' gibberin' if we go inside, but there's not a damn thing he can do."

They began to walk side by side across the snow-covered ground. Hans guessed that it must have started at least an hour ago. A faint glow of dawn was touching the eastern horizon, and by its light the outline of the pinnace was visible ahead. An outline only, because already it stood covered with a thin layer of snow. Cone-houses, scattered all the way to the horizon, formed steep-sided pyramids of white.

Their suits kept the men warm, but Hans confirmed from his monitor the large and sudden drop in temperature. Snow was sticking to everything, which meant that the air and ground could not be much below freezing.