At least the
Indulgence
was intact. But the ship was useless, as it had been for the past two months. Nenda had checked the engines every day. They were in perfect condition, with ample power. There was just one problem: they refused to carry the ship up from the surface of the planet. Something—the annular singularities themselves, or more likely the Builder constructs who controlled them—had inhibited every attempt at take-off.
"Quickly, Louis Nenda. This is no time for introspection."
It hadn't been more than two seconds since Atvar H'sial dropped him on the ground with his chest half crushed.
"Get off my back, At. Gimme time to breathe." Nenda swung the hatch open. "If the engines don't work this time, it'll be the last shot of introspection we'll ever get."
The lift-off sequence had been waiting in the computer for two months. The navigation system was primed and ready. Louis was in the pilot's seat two seconds after the hatch opened. Unfortunately, the power build-up of the
Indulgence
's engines took a minimum of three minutes, and it was far from silent.
Three minutes. Three minutes of sitting, staring at the screens, wondering when the first head of midnight blue would peer curiously out of one of the towers, or lift from the calm sea.
"What do we do if the engines don't work this time, At?" Was that the curling end of a long tentacle, or just a ripple on the blue water?
"We will chastise the Zardalu, blaming them for the inadequacy of their assistance to us in refurbishing the ship."
"Right. Lots of luck." It
was
a tentacle. And now a head had broken the surface. The Zardalu were swimming rapidly for shore, four of them, and now half-a-dozen more. They must have felt the vibrations, and known that they came from the engines of the
Indulgence
.
Still over a minute to go. Was it time to send Atvar H'sial to man the ship's weapons system? Maybe they could swing it one more time; persuade the Zardalu that another day or two was all it would need to give them access to space. But that persuasion would have to be done
outside
the ship, without weapons . . .
"Has it occurred to you, Louis Nenda, that if we do achieve orbit, and depart Genizee, we will once again be leaving empty-handed?" Atvar H'sial was crouched by his side, her echolocation vision useless to see what was happening outside the ship. "We did not have the foresight to stock the
Indulgence
with samples of Builder technology. We do not even have Zardalu trophies. I blame myself for a major lack of foresight."
Thirty seconds to go. The ship was vibrating all over as power build-up hit sixty percent. Zardalu were boiling up out of the water and whipping themselves along the shore toward the ship. The nearest was less than forty yards away. Others were appearing from the sandstone towers. And Atvar H'sial was bemoaning the lack of mementoes!
Nenda gripped the controls, a lot harder than necessary. "At, you can have my share of trophies, every one of 'em. I'll be glad to get out of here with my ass and hat. Hold on tight. I'm going for a premature lift."
The nearest Zardalu was reaching out long tentacles toward the ship. Power was less than seventy-five percent, below the nominal minimum. The
Indulgence
shuddered at Nenda's lift-off command and rose three feet off the ground. It hovered for a moment before sliding lazily sideways and down to the soft earth.
Too soon!
Forty seconds were recommended between engine power pulses. Nenda managed to wait for a quarter of that, until he heard something slap at the hatch and begin to turn the handle. He gritted his teeth and hit the lift-off sequence again.
The
Indulgence
shivered and began a wobbling, drunken ascent. Nenda watched the ground as it drifted past on the viewscreens. They were at six feet—ten feet—still within reach of questing tentacles. The shoreline was approaching. The ship was crabbing sideways, slowly lifting. Engine power was nearing eighty percent.
"We're going to make it, At. We're lifting, and nothing aloft is stopping us." Nenda glanced at a viewing screen. "Hold on, though. We got a problem. There's a whole line of Zardalu, right at the edge of the beach. We might be low enough for them to grab us."
"What are they doing?"
Nenda stared hard. He didn't speak the Zardalu slave tongue all that well, and the body language was even harder to read. But the splayed lower tentacles and the upper two raised high above every Zardalu head, together with the wide-open gaping beaks, were an easy signal.
"You won't believe this, At. But they're cheering."
"As they should be. For are we not demonstrating to them that, as promised, we are able to leave the surface of Genizee and go to space?"
"Yeah. But they won't cheer so loud when they find out we're not coming back. They were relying on us to get them off the planet and back into the spiral arm. They're going to be mad as hell."
"Perhaps so." The ship was rising steadily, and the waving Zardalu were no more than blue dots on the gray-brown beach. Atvar H'sial settled into a more comfortable position at Nenda's side. "But they ought to be most grateful."
"Huh?" The
Indulgence
was moving faster, above the thick haze of Genizee's lower atmosphere. Louis gave the Cecropian beside him only a fraction of his attention. Already he was beginning to worry about the next step. They might be off the planet, but they were still deep within the convoluted space-time of the Torvil Anfract.
"I assert, they should be grateful." The pheromonal message carried with it an overtone of sleepy satisfaction. There was no hint that half a minute earlier Atvar H'sial had been facing possible death. "Think about it, Louis. We have been very good to them. We did not exterminate them, although the very name of Zardalu strikes terror through the whole spiral arm. We did not kill or mutilate them, although that is their own habit with slaves. We have not taken their most prized possessions—a short-sighted omission on my part, I admit, and one for which I take full responsibility. And we have even left them their planet."
"You're all heart, At."
"In Zardalu terms, we have been Masters both kind and generous." Atvar H'sial settled lower on the cabin floor. "However, we have done one other
thing for the Zardalu, which pleases me less. We have demonstrated that the road to space from Genizee is now open."
"No thanks to us that the singularities went away. That just happened. Maybe they'll come back." Nenda caught another drift of pheromones, with an unmistakable molecular message. "Hey, you better not be falling asleep back there. This isn't the time for it. We're still in the middle of the Anfract. Suppose it's changing, too? The flight plan we made before may not take us out."
"We escaped from Genizee." The Cecropian was closing the twin yellow horns, turning off her echolocation receivers. The six-foot antennas on top of her head were furling their delicate fanlike receptors. "I have no doubt that you will find a way to take us out of the Torvil Anfract. Wake me when we are clear. Then I will compute a trajectory to take us to the
Have-It-All
."
"Don't try to get off the hook by talking about my ship." Nenda turned to glare at Atvar H'sial's body, with the six jointed legs housed comfortably along its sides. "You need to stay awake and alert. If I don't handle the exit from the Anfract just right, it could kill you."
"But not without also killing you." The Cecropian's thin proboscis curled down, to tuck away into the pouch at the bottom of her pleated chin. "You should be gratified, Louis," she said sleepily, "pleased that I have such confidence in you. And confidence, of course, in your finely-developed sense of
self
-preservation."
The Torvil Anfract has a bad reputation, but the reality is worse. Phrases like "multiply-connected space-time" and "macroscopic quantum phenomena" don't tell the half of it.
Anfract
is the noun formed from the adjective
anfractuous
, which means full of twists, turns, and windings; but that gives no more than a flavor of the real thing. Even the knowledge that the whole Anfract is a Builder artifact, of unimaginably vast proportions, fails to deliver the right message.
Of more significance is the fact that less than a quarter of the ships that have entered the Anfract have ever come back to report what they found there. If getting
in
is difficult, it is nothing compared to the problem of getting out.
Louis knew all that. For seven full days, the
Indulgence
had crawled alongside granular sheets of quantum anomalies, seeking an opening, or eeled its way through knotted space-time dislocations. For all that time, Louis had watched Atvar H'sial snoozing, and had thought dark thoughts.
Cecropians were accustomed to having sighted slaves who did all their dog work. Atvar H'sial, deprived of her Lo'tfian slave, J'merlia, seemed to be taking Louis Nenda for granted as an acceptable substitute. She never gave a thought to the fact that Louis might miss his own Hymenopt slave, Kallik, at least as much as she missed J'merlia. And she blithely assumed that he would bring them out of the Anfract, with not one ounce of help from her.
For seven days Louis had got by with catnaps in the uncomfortable pilot's chair. He had made bathroom runs—literally—and wolfed down his meals in spare seconds. Atvar H'sial, for the few hours a day that she had been awake, had spent her time in the galley, making evil-smelling liquid refreshments to suit her exact tastes.
The worst of it was that Atvar H'sial was right. The
Indulgence
had been designed for piloting by a five-armed Chism Polypheme, with all the arms on one side of his body. Louis Nenda found the pilot's seat inconvenient, to put it mildly, but at least he and the Polypheme both possessed
eyes
. If blind Atvar H'sial had tried to take the
Indulgence
out of the Torvil Anfract, she and Louis Nenda would have died in the first hour of flight.
That was logic, and undeniable. But Louis was not interested in logic. Whenever there was a free moment he turned to glare at the sleeping hulk of his business partner; he thought about reprisals.
Not physical ones. That wouldn't work with someone twice his size and four times his strength. The most effective revenge on Atvar H'sial was to
cheat
her. But how was he going to do that, when neither of them owned anything? Even their slaves were gone. If he managed to find his way back to Glister and his beloved
Have-it-all
, that ship was
Nenda
's. It was hard to see any way to use the
Have-it-all
to cheat Atvar H'sial.
Revenge is a dish best eaten cold
. Louis kept that in mind, while he brooded over Atvar H'sial. What sort of stupid creature was it anyway, who saw using sound, and talked using smell? And in spite of this, his partner thought herself
superior
to humans and everyone else in the spiral arm.
As he schemed and fumed, the
Indulgence
under his careful guidance crept clear of the Anfract. His annoyance was so absorbing, it was almost an anticlimax when the panorama of star-dogs and the pinwheel fireworks of rotating micro-galaxies suddenly ended, and he saw ahead a clean, undistorted starfield.
It brought him fully awake for the first time in days. He realized then how exhausted he had become. He was so tired, so gritty-eyed bone-weary worn out, it was amazing that he had remained awake for so long. It would have been so easy to have killed them both by falling asleep in the middle of the Anfract. Maybe he should have done that. It would have served Atvar H'sial right. The trouble was, she would never have known it. And of course he would be dead, too.
He
was
tired, when that passed for thinking.
Nenda went over to the sleeping Atvar H'sial and nudged her with his boot.
"Your turn. I've done my bit."
The Cecropian awoke like the unfolding of a gigantic and hideous flower. Six jointed limbs stretched luxuriantly away from the dark-red body, while the yellow horns opened and the long antennas unfurled like delicate ferns.
"No problems?" The pheromones generated by Atvar H'sial were a statement more than a question. The Cecropian lifted her white, eyeless head and scanned around her.
"Nothing you want to hear about. We're out of the Anfract." Nenda sniffed noisily and headed at once for the sleeping quarters. They were designed for a Chism Polypheme, a nine-foot tall corkscrew with helical symmetry; even so, they should be a lot better than the pilot's chair. "Don't bother waking me for the Bose jumps," he said over his shoulder. "Just let me know when we get to the Mandel system."
That might take a day, or it might take a month. Louis felt ready for something nicely in between—say, four or five days of sleep—when he collapsed onto the bunk. He tried to shape his body to the awkward spiral padding.
Everything depended on how tricky Atvar H'sial could get. The Torvil Anfract lay in remote Zardalu Communion territory, hundreds of light-years away from the Phemus Circle. Mandel's stellar system was located within the Circle. The
Have-it-all
had been left near a gas-giant planet, Gargantua, that orbited Mandel. But linear distance was quite irrelevant. The
Indulgence
would negotiate a series of superluminal transitions, jumps through the nodes of the Bose Network. Travel time was a function of operator cunning, node loading, and energy budget.
Atvar H'sial could see nothing at all in human terms, but she had a remarkable power to visualize. Louis knew that when it came to manipulating the nonlinear connectors of the Bose geometry, she left him standing.
So he felt a strange mixture of pleasure and annoyance when, twelve hours later, she came to where he was still trying to fit his body—unsuccessfully—to a corkscrew shape, and announced: "I have a problem, Louis. I would welcome your counsel."
"What's up?" Nenda abandoned any attempt to sleep and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk.
"I am wondering. When you were navigating our way clear of the Torvil Anfract, did you notice anything unusual about it?"