Before she could respond he strode ahead of her, into the building and through to the interior room where they had started. Kallik and J’merlia were still there, crouched low on the floor with their multiple legs spread flat and intertwined. They were exchanging ominous whistles and grunts.

Louis Nenda grabbed the Hymenopt roughly by the halter, attached the black cane, and pulled. “Come on, you. I told you, no fighting. We’ve got work to do.” He turned back to Darya. “Nice to meet you, Professor. See you on Quake?”

“You will, Louis Nenda.” Darya’s voice was shaking with anger. “You can count on it.”

He gave a scoffing laugh. “Fine. I’ll save a drink for you there. If Perry’s right, we may both need one.”

He pulled hard on the cane and dragged Kallik out.

Seething, Darya went across to where J’merlia was slowly standing up. “How is Atvar H’sial?”

“Much better. She will be fully ready to resume work in one more Dobelle day.”

“Good. Tell her that I have made up my mind and agree to cooperate fully with her. I will do everything we discussed. I am ready to take off for Quakeside and the Umbilical as soon as she is recovered.”

“I will tell her this at once. It is good news.” J’merlia moved closer, studying Darya’s face. “But you have had some bad experience, Darya Lang. Did the man seek to hurt you?”

“No. Not a physical hurt.” But he hurt me anyway. “He made me angry and upset. I’m sorry, J’merlia. He wanted to talk, and so we went outside. I thought you were asleep. I didn’t realize that you would be threatened by that horrible animal of his.”

J’merlia was staring at her and shaking his thin mantis-head in a gesture he had picked up from the humans. “Threatened? By that?” He pointed to the door. “By the Hymenopt?”

“Yes.”

“I was not threatened. Kallik and I were beginning a proto-converse — a first learning of each other’s language.”

“Language?” Darya thought of the whipping cane and the halter. “Are you telling me that it can talk? It’s not just a simple animal?”

“Honored Professor Lang, Kallik can certainly talk. She never had the chance to learn more than Hymenopt speech, because she met few others and her master did not care for her to know. But she is learning. We began with less than fifty words in common; now we have more than one hundred.” J’merlia moved to the door, his wounded leg still trailing. “Excuse me, honored Professor. I must leave now and find Atvar H’sial. It is a pity that Kallik is leaving this place. But maybe we will have an opportunity to talk and learn again when they arrive.”

“Arrive? Where are they going?”

“Where everyone is going, it seems.” J’merlia paused on the threshold. “To Quake. Where else?”

CHAPTER 11

Summertide minus thirteen

Violent resistance is a problem, but nonresistance can be harder to handle.

Hans Rebka felt like a boxer, braced for a blow that never came. At some level he was still waiting.

“Didn’t they fight it?” he asked.

Max Perry nodded. “Sure. At least, Louis Nenda did. But then he said he’d had it with the Dobelle system, and we could take his access request and stuff it, he was getting the hell out of here as soon as he could. And he already left.”

“What about Darya Lang and Atvar H’sial?”

“Lang didn’t say a word. There’s no way of knowing what Atvar H’sial thinks, but what came out of J’merlia didn’t have much steam in it. They went off to sulk on another Sling. I haven’t seen them for two days — haven’t had time to bother with them, to be honest. Think we ought to be worried?”

The two men were in the final moments of waiting as the capsule taking them to Quake was coupled to the Umbilical. They were carrying their luggage, one small bag for each man. Julius Graves was over by the aircar that had brought them from Starside, fussing with his two heavy cases.

Rebka considered Perry’s question carefully. His own assignment to Dobelle involved only the rehabilitation of Max Perry. In principle it had nothing to do with members of other clades, or how they were treated. But as far everyone on Opal was concerned, he was a senior official, and he had the duties that went with the position. He had received a new coded message from Circle headquarters just before they left Starside, but he had no great hopes that it would help him much, whatever it said. Advice and direction from far away were more likely to add to problems than to solve them.

“People ought to be protesting a lot more,” he said at last. “Especially Louis Nenda. What’s the chances that he might leave Opal and try for a direct landing on Quake from space? He came in his own ship.”

“There’s no way we could stop him trying. But unless his ship is designed for takeoff without spaceport facilities, he’ll be in trouble. He might get down on Quake, but maybe he’d never get off it.”

“How about Darya Lang and Atvar H’sial?”

“Impossible. They don’t have a ship available, and they won’t be able to rent one that will fly interplanetary. We can forget about them.”

And then Perry hesitated. He was not sure of his own statement. There was that feeling in the air, a sense of final calm before a great storm. And it was not just the cloudbursts that threatened Opal within twenty-four hours.

It was Summertide, hanging over everything. With thirteen Dobelle days to go, Mandel and Amaranth loomed larger and brighter. Average temperatures were already up five degrees, under angry clouds like molten copper. Opal’s air had changed in the last twelve hours. It was charged with a metallic taste that matched the lowering sky. Airborne dust left lips dry, eyes sore and weeping, noses itching and ready to sneeze. As the massive tides brought the seabed close to the surface, undersea earthquakes and eruptions were blowing their irritant fumes and dust high into the atmosphere.

Julius Graves had finally stowed the cases to his satisfaction in the bottom level of the Umbilical’s car. He walked over to the other two men and stared up at the lambent sky.

“Another storm coming. A good time to be leaving Opal.”

“But a worse time to be going to Quake,” Perry said.

They climbed into the car. Perry provided his personal ID and keyed in a complex command sequence.

The three men maintained an uneasy formality as the ascent began. When Perry had quietly informed Graves that access to Quake was denied until after Summertide, Graves had just as coolly asserted the authority of the Council. He would be going to Quake anyway.

Perry pointed out that Graves could not prevent planetary officials from accompanying him. They had a responsibility to stop him from killing himself.

Graves nodded. Everyone was polite; no one was happy.

The tension eased when the capsule emerged from Opal’s clouds. The three men had something else to occupy their minds. The car had been provided with sliding viewing ports in its upper level, as well as a large window directly overhead. The passengers had an excellent view of everything above and about them. As Quake appeared through the thinning clouds, any attempt at small talk faded.

Julius Graves stared around, gasped, and gaped, while Max Perry took one look up and retreated into himself. Hans Rebka tried to ignore their surroundings and focus his mind on the task ahead. Perry might know all about Quake, and Graves might be a fount of information about every subject under a thousand suns; yet Rebka had the feeling that he would have to carry both of them.

But carry them through what? He looked around, to find a panorama that swept away all rational thoughts. He had traveled the road to Quake just a few days before, but nothing was the same. Mandel, grossly swollen, loomed on the left. The Builder-designed shell of the car detected and filtered out dangerous hard radiation, turning the star’s glowing face into a dark image seamed and pocked with faculae, sunspots, and lurid flares. The disk was so large that Rebka felt he could reach out and touch its raddled surface.