Convergence

by Charles Sheffield

Chapter One

It was a sobering thought: to contemplate a whole world, with all its diverse environments and its swarming life-forms. And then to reflect that you were apparently the only one of those myriad forms who sweated — or needed to.

Louis Nenda wiped his forehead with a fuzzy piece of cloth, and as a second thought mopped his bare chest and his dripping armpits. Although it wasn’t yet noon in Genizee’s forty-two-hour day, the temperature had to be around a hundred. Humid, hot, and horrible, like the inside of a steam boiler. Nenda looked up, seeking the disk of Genizee’s orange-yellow sun. He couldn’t see it. The annular singularities that shielded the planet were strong today. Louis saw nothing more than a swirl of colors, shifting in patterns that defeated the eye’s attempt to track them.

A whistling grunt brought his attention back to more mundane concerns. Half-a-dozen Zardalu were dragging a ten-meter cylinder along the flat sandy shore for his inspection. No sign of discomfort in them. The midnight-blue bodies of the land-cephalopods, protected by their waxy outer leather, seemed impervious to either heat or cold.

The Zardalu paused respectfully, half-a-dozen paces from Louis Nenda, and bent to touch their broad heads to the beach.

“The Great Silent One found this in one of the interior tunnels.”

Nenda stared down at the prone figures stretching their tentacles six meters and more along the beach. The leading Zardalu was using the clicks and whistles of the old language, the ancient Zardalu Communion slave talk. It lacked a decent technical vocabulary, but Louis was willing to put up with that. The master-slave relationship was all that mattered.

“She told you to bring it here?”

“The Great Silent One indicated that to us. I am sorry, Master, but we are still unable to understand the Great Silent One’s speech.”

“Atvar H’sial’s not easy to understand. Maybe you’ll catch on one day, when you get a bit smarter.”

Louis prayed, not for the first time, that this particular day would be a long time coming. If the Zardalu ever really caught on…

“Do you think, Master, that this might be the missing component?”

“Could be. Have to study it before I can be sure. Leave it here. Now get back inside, and help the Great Silent One.”

“Yes, Master. Let us pray that this is indeed the necessary component. For all our sakes.”

Nenda watched them as they retreated toward one of the holes that led to the interior. They weren’t groveling as much as usual. And that last crack hadn’t sounded quite as subservient as it should. “For all our sakes.” Maybe it was his imagination, but it sounded more like a threat than a prayer.

Even so, he was glad to see them go. Those huge beaks were big enough to bite him in half. The great tentacles could tear a human limb from limb. Louis had seen it done.

And some day soon, he might see it done again. Or feel it.

How long had it been? He squinted up again toward the invisible sun. Nearly two months. He and Atvar H’sial had stalled the Zardalu for all that time, pretending that they had the know-how to take the Indulgence out to space and away from Genizee. When the Zardalu found out that Nenda and Atvar H’sial were as trapped on the planet as they were, it would all be over.

It wasn’t the ship; he was sure of that. The Indulgence was perfectly spaceworthy. It was those damned annular singularities, the eye-twisting glow that he was peering at now, and the Builder constructs that controlled them. They made space off-limits to anything that started up from the surface of Genizee. How long before the Zardalu latched on to the fact that Louis was as helpless as they were?

Louis went across to the cylinder that they had dumped on the beach, and sat down on one end of it. He inspected it, bending over with his head tucked down between his knees to examine its hollow inside. An old piece of air circulation ducting, by the look of it. About as able to fly into space as Louis himself.

The sweat was trickling down his inverted face and into his eyes. Louis straightened up and mopped again with the sodden cloth. The sea, a hundred yards away across the beach, was cool and tempting. Louis would have been in for a dip hours ago, if he hadn’t long since learned of the fanged horrors that swam beneath the calm surface. They made the Zardalu seem tame.

He might as well head for the tunnel system and see how Atvar H’sial was doing. It would be dark there, and clammy, but it would be cooler.

Louis eased his way off the air duct and stood for a moment in thought. Something felt a little bit different. What was it? Maybe sitting with his head down had made him dizzy. It sure wasn’t any improvement in the weather. It was hotter than ever. Even the top of his skull felt as though it was burning up.

He put up a hand to rub at his dark matted hair. He was burning up. His hair felt hot. Maybe he was getting sick. That would be just what he needed, to catch some alien planet’s bug, out in the ass-end of nowhere, where the native drugs and painkillers didn’t work unless you happened to have a beak and blue tentacles.

Louis removed his hand from his head. As he did so he caught a flicker of movement on the ground in front of him. He stared, blinked, and stared again. He was seeing something there: something that could not be. He was seeing a shadow.

His own shadow. Louis spun around and stared up. The unshielded sun was visible, bright and glaring. For the first time since he and Atvar H’sial set foot on Genizee, the swirling light of the annular singularities had vanished.

Louis gazed directly at the marigold sun for at least two seconds — long enough so that when he stopped he saw nothing but dark, pulsing circles. Even before they faded, he was running.

He had to get to the interior tunnels. He had to find Atvar H’sial, and bring her to the surface before any of the Zardalu saw what had happened and realized its possible significance.

The sun’s after-images blinded him to what lay ahead. Close to the entrance of the tunnel he ran full tilt into a springy surface that bounced him away onto the sand. Nenda heard a deep grunt. Three jointed limbs reached down and raised him effortlessly to his feet.

“Louis Nenda, save your energy for the future.” The pheromonal message diffused across to him from Atvar H’sial, with a subtext of concern and warning. “I fear we have troubles ahead.”

The giant Cecropian set him gently onto the sand. The creature towering over Nenda inclined her white, eyeless head, with its pair of yellow open horns below two six-foot fanlike antennas. Beneath the head was a short neck banded in scarlet-and-white ruffles, leading to the dark-red segments of the underbody. The whole effect, propped up on six jointed bristly limbs, was the stuff of nightmares.

But not to Louis Nenda. He did not give the Cecropian’s anatomy a second thought. He had seen too many aliens to go by appearances. “Trouble? What kind?” Nenda’s pheromonal augment went into action, even though he was too winded to speak.

“The interior of Genizee is changing, in ways that I cannot explain.” The pheromonal language of the Cecropian, unlike the slave talk of the Zardalu Communion, possessed degrees of subtlety and shading denied to even the richest of human tongues. Atvar H’sial’s speech included images of collapsing walls, closing tunnels, and vanishing chambers, deep within the planet. “If this continues, our pretence of the need for interior exploration will be destroyed. The Zardalu will demand that we demonstrate to them the powers that we have so long claimed, and take them to space.”