"You gotta be kidding!" Nenda stood up and massaged his thighs, trying to get the stiffness out of them. "The whole Anfract is unusual. You find anything normal in there, it don't belong. Why'd you ask?"
"Like any serious student of the Bose Network, I have learned certain preferred node combinations—shortcuts, in effect, both for energy and total transition time. Those preferred modes of transport, naturally, depend critically on the space-time structure of the Network itself."
"Is that right?" Nenda's pheromonal message carried an expression of total disinterest, one that Atvar H'sial could not miss.
The blind head nodded. "Hear me out, Louis Nenda, before you scoff. Except over very long time-scales, of centuries or more, the preferred node combinations ought to be invariant."
"Sure."
"But they apparently are not. For the past twelve hours I have been examining alternative routes to Mandel. Not one of the fastest and cheapest employs my standard node combinations. Instead I am coming up with an alternative to take us from here to Mandel with incredibly low cost and high speed."
"So you missed a good one." It was hard to keep the pleasure out of the pheromones. "Hey, At, anyone can goof up now and again."
"To err is human? Just so. It is not, however, Cecropian. Accept my assurances, Louis Nenda, that I did not overlook a cheap path for transition. That path was not present when we entered the Anfract, just a couple of your months ago."
"But you just said—"
"I know what I said. The travel times associated with particular node combinations should be stable for very long periods. They must be so—provided that the overall structure of space-time in the spiral arm is not subjected to major perturbations. Now do you see the reason for my question concerning the structure of the Anfract? Had it substantially changed since we entered?"
"If it did, I have no way of knowing. You see, I didn't plan our way out, At, I felt the way out. Seat of my pants. I'm a pretty good pilot, even if I'm not up to Dulcimer's level."
"I agree; and if we are in confessional mode, let me also make an admission. I lack the experience to make a full evaluation of the new route to Mandel that I have discovered. It should prove considerably shorter than anything I have met before. On the other hand, since it is new there is a possible risk factor. A node used for our transition could lie too near to a star or a chasm singularity."
"Lovely thought. You know me, At. I'm a natural coward. I say, go slow, but go safe."
"And again I agree. Or I would, if these were normal times. But since the moment of our first meeting, Louis, has it not been clear that something exceptional has been happening within the spiral arm? The changes to Quake at the time of the Grand Conjunction, the rogue Phages around Glister, our encounters with the Builder Constructs, the passage through the Builder transportation system, the re-awakening of the Zardalu—"
"Hey! Don't let me spoil your fun, but I don't wanna hear any of that. So we've been through some strange stuff together. Are you suggesting that we go lookin' for more of the same, with your special fast trip to Mandel?"
"Worse than that, Louis. I am asking the question, what next? Suppose that great changes continue to occur in the spiral arm. Suppose that those changes were eventually to include a failure of the Bose Network. Suppose our progress from this point on were to be restricted to subluminal speeds—"
"Don't
say
that. We'd be stuck in crawlspace for the rest of our lives, just the two of us with each other for company, out at the ass-end of the known universe."
"A dismal prospect indeed—though worse for me, I suggest, than for you. But that is why I awakened you—to ask, should we risk the fast transit to Mandel?"
"You call that a risk? Go do it—get that new flight plan into the computer."
Atvar H'sial inclined her head, in a gesture common to humans and Cecropians. "It is already there, Louis, ready for execution. I did not doubt that, faced with the alternative, you and I would once more find ourselves in full agreement."
Four days and six Bose Transitions later, Louis Nenda was beginning to have second thoughts. The
Indulgence
was on its final, slow, subluminal leg of the journey from the Torvil Anfract, heading out from the star Mandel toward its gas-giant planet, Gargantua. Nenda's own ship, the
Have-It-All
, should be where they had left it months earlier, on Glister, the little artificial planetoid that orbited Gargantua.
The journey from the edge of the Anfract had gone without a hitch. They had found no sign of the changes to the apiral arm that had worried Atvar H'sial. And that, when you got right down to it, was the source of Nenda's own uneasiness.
He was a squat, muscular human, born (though he could certainly never go back there) on the minor planet of Karelia, in a remote part of Zardalu Communion territory. Atvar H'sial was a towering Cecropian, from one of the leading worlds of the Cecropia Federation.
He preferred brutal directness; she was all slippery tangents. He might kill in moments of anger. She never seemed to feel anger, but she would destroy through calm calculation. They happened to be able to speak to each other, because Nenda had long ago obtained an augment for just such a purpose, but their overlap ended there. He and Atvar H'sial seemed to have nothing in common.
And yet . . .
They had first met on the doublet planet of Quake and Opal, in the Mandel stellar system where they now moved. Somehow, like had called instantly to like. When it came to business practices, Nenda knew that he did not need to ask Atvar H'sial's opinion. It was enough to sound out his own. In Louis Nenda's view, all sensible beings had the same business principles.
And what were they?
Sensible beings did not discuss such matters.
Which meant that if Atvar H'sial ever had an opportunity to cheat Louis Nenda, without risk to herself, she would surely do it.
Mutual need had held them together on Genizee, but that was over now. He could not see
how
she might be setting him up, but a good scam was never discernible in advance. And of course, there was another reason why he was not a good target: the only things he owned in the whole world, now that his slave was gone, were the clothes he stood up in; plus his ship, the
Have-It-All
—if they ever got that far.
Louis Nenda sank back into uneasy sleep.
He had spent most of the journey to Mandel napping, or trying to, as much as the corkscrew template of the Chism Polypheme bunk permitted. When discomfort and boredom finally drove him once more to the control room, he found that Atvar H'sial had been busy. She had rigged the electronics so that the visual signals of Nenda's display screens were converted to multisource ultrasonics. She now "saw" just what he saw, although so far as he could tell it was not in color.
And what she claimed now, as the result of that "seeing," roused Nenda's worst suspicions.
"As I anticipated, Louis," she said. "There have been changes in the Mandel system, and profound ones. See."
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
. . ."