Amaranth — a dwarf no longer — stood beyond Quake. The companion was transformed. Even the color was changed. Rebka recognized that as an artificial effect. When the car windows altered their transmission properties to screen radiation from Mandel, they also modified the transmitted spectrum of Amaranth. Orange-red was transformed to glowering purple.
Even Gargantua was well on the way to its final rendezvous. Reflecting the light of both Mandel and Amaranth, the gas-giant had swelled from a distant spark to a thumbnail-sized glow of bright orange.
The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin. In the final hours of Summertide, Mandel and Amaranth would pass within five million kilometers of each other — the thickness of a fingernail, in stellar terms. Gargantua would hurtle close by Mandel on the side opposite to Amaranth, propelled in its orbit by the combined field of both stellar companions. And little Dobelle, caught in that syzygy of giants, would gyrate helplessly through the warp and woof of a dynamic gravitational tapestry.
The Dobelle orbit was stable; there was no danger that Opal and Quake would separate, or that the doublet might be flung off to infinity. But that was the only assurance the astronomers would provide. Summertide surface conditions on Opal and Quake could not be calculated.
Rebka stared up at Quake. That ball of dusky blue-gray had become the most familiar feature in the sky. It had not changed perceptibly since the last ride up the Umbilical.
Or had it? He stared harder. Was the planet’s limb a little fuzzier, where dust in the peel-thin layer of air surrounding Quake had become thicker?
There were few distractions to draw a traveler’s mind away from the outside view. Their ascent was at a constant rate, with no sense of motion inside the car. Only a very careful observer would notice the golden knot of Midway Station slowly increasing in size, while the apparent gravity within the capsule was just as gradually diminishing. The journey did not take place in free-fall. The body forces were decreasing steadily, but the only weightless part of the journey would be two thousand kilometers beyond Midway Station, where all centrifugal and gravitational forces were in balance. After that came the real descent to Quake, when the capsule would truly be falling toward that planet.
Rebka sighed and stood up. It would be easy to allow the skyscape to hypnotize him, as Quake hypnotized Max Perry. And not just Perry. He glanced across at Graves. The councilor was totally absorbed in a reverie of his own.
Rebka walked over to the ramp and went down its turning path to the lower level of the capsule. The galley was a primitive one, but there had been no chance of a meal since they left Starside. He was hungry and not choosy, and he dialed without looking. The flavor and contents of the container of soup that he ordered did not matter.
With its opaque walls, the lower level of the capsule was depressingly bland. Rebka went to the table and selected a private music segment. Pre-Expansion music, complex and polyphonic, sounded within his head. The intertwining fugal voices suggested the coming interplay of Mandel and its retinue. For ten minutes Rebka ate and listened, enjoying two of the most basic and oldest pleasures of humanity. He wondered. Did the Cecropians, lacking music, have some compensating art form of their own?
When the piece ended he was surprised to find Julius Graves standing there watching him.
“May I?” The councilor sat down at the table and gestured at the empty bowl. “Can you recommend it?”
Rebka shrugged. Whatever Julius Graves wanted from him, opinions on soup were low on the list.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Graves said, “how improbable it is that we are able, with very little assistance, to eat and digest the foods of a thousand different worlds? The ingredients of that soup were produced on Opal, but your stomach will have no trouble handling it. We and the Hymenopts and the beings of the Cecropian clade are totally different biologically. Not one of them is DNA-based. And yet, with the help of a few strains of single-celled bacteria in our gut, we can eat the same food as each other. Surprising, is it not?”
“I guess so.”
Rebka hated one-on-one conversations with Graves. Those mad blue eyes scared him. Even when the conversation seemed general he suspected an undercurrent, and to add to the confusion he was never sure how much input was coming from the mnemonic twin. Steven had a fondness for endless facts and stupid jokes, Julius for subtlety and indirection. The present conversation could be simple speculation from the one, or a devious probing from the other.
Graves was grinning to himself. “I know, you don’t think it’s significant that we can eat Opal’s food, or Quake’s. But it is. For one thing, it disposes of a popular theory as to why Cecropians and humans did not fight when first they met. People say they avoided combat because they were not competing for the same resources. But that is nonsense. They not only compete for the same inorganic resources of metals and raw materials; they are also — with a little assistance at the bacterial level — able to eat the same food. A human could eat a Cecropian, if the need arose. Or vice versa. And that introduces a new mystery.”
Rebka nodded to show that he was listening. It was better to play the straight man than say too much.
“We look at a Cecropian,” Graves continued, “or a Lo’tfian, or a Hymenopt, and we say, how alien they are! How different from us! But the mystery is surely the other way round. We should say, why are we all so similar? How is it possible that beings derived from different clades, seeded on different worlds, warmed by suns of other stellar types, of totally disjoint biology, without one item of common history — how can it be that they are so alike that they can eat the same foods? That they are so close in body shape that we can use Earth-analogs — Cecropians, Hymenopts, Chrysemides — in beings from the most distant stars. That we can all talk to each other, one way or another, and understand each other amazingly well. That we share the same standards of behavior. So much so, that a single ethical council can agree on rules to apply through the whole of the spiral arm. How can these things be?
“But then, the spiral arm is filled with mysteries.”
Graves was heading somewhere, Rebka was sure. But the other had a long way to go before he made any kind of sense. For the moment, all he seemed to offer was a philosophical lecture.
“Many mysteries,” Graves went on. “The Builders, of course. What happened to them? What was their physiology, their history, their science? What is the function of the Lens, or of Paradox, or of Flambeau, or of the Phages? Of all the constructs of the Builders, surely the Phages are the most useless. Steven, if permitted, will discourse for many hours on this subject.”
Rebka nodded again. But, pray God, he won’t.
“And there are other, more recent mysteries, ones that puzzle me extremely. Think of the Zardalu. A few millennia ago they ruled more than a thousand worlds. We hear from their subject species that they were tyrannical, ruthless, merciless. But as their empire crumbled, those same vassal species rebelled and exterminated every Zardalu. Genocide. Was that not an action more barbaric than any practiced by the Zardalu themselves? And why did they choose to rule as they did? Did they have a different idea of ethical behavior, one unrecognizable to us? If so, they were truly alien, but we will never know in what way. What would an ethical council have made of the Zardalu?”
…a single ethical council can agree on rules… Rebka saw the sudden agony on Graves’s lined face, and his mind flicked back to that earlier comment. By talking alternative moralities for the Zardalu, was Graves questioning the rules set up by his own council? Was he preparing to disobey his own instructions?