Divergence

“For me, too many legs,” she repeated. “Sixteen too many. And too many eyes for you.”

He understood at once and touched her arm apologetically. The Lo’tfian, J’merlia, seemed mostly legs and eyes. Eight black articulated limbs were attached to the long, pipestem torso, and J’merlia’s narrow head was dominated by the big, lemon-colored compound eyes on short eyestalks. Kallik was just as well-endowed. The Hymenopt’s body was short, stubby, and black-furred, but eight wiry legs sprang from the rotund torso, and the small, smooth head was entirely surrounded by multiple pairs of bright, black eyes. Kallik and J’merlia did not mean to get in the way, but when they were both awake and active it was impossible to move around the ship’s little cabin without tripping over the odd outstretched appendage.

Darya Lang and Hans Rebka had retreated to the berths as the only place left. But even there they found little privacy — or too little, Darya thought, for Hans Rebka.

The two months since she had left her quiet life as a research scientist on Sentinel Gate had been full of surprises; not least of them was the discovery that many “facts” about life on the backward and impoverished worlds of the Perimeter were just not so. Everyone on Shasta knew that the urge to reproduce dominated everything on the underpopulated planets of the Phemus Circle, where both men and women were obsessed with sex. The rich worlds of the Fourth Alliance “knew” that people on Teufel and Scaldworld and Quake and Opal did it whenever and wherever they could.

Perhaps so, in principle; there was a curious primness in border planet society when it came to practice. Men and women might show immediate interest in each other, from bold eye contact to open invitation. But let the time arrive for doing something, in public or even in private, and Darya suspected they were oddly puritanical.

She had obtained positive and a

He rebuffed her, though in an oddly indirect way. “Of course I’d like to — but what about your foot?” he whispered. “You’ll hurt it too much. I mean — we can’t. Your foot…”

Darya’s foot had been burned during the retreat from Quake at Summertide. It was healing fast. She resisted the urge to say, “Damn my foot. Why don’t you just let me be the judge of what hurts too much?”

Instead she withdrew, convinced that Hans came from one of those curious societies where women were not supposed to take the lead in sexual matters. She waited. And waited. Finally, during the next sleep period, she asked what was wrong. Wasn’t he interested? Didn’t he find her attractive?

“Of course I do.” He kept his voice low and glanced across toward the two aliens. As far as Darya could tell they were both sound asleep, in an untidy sprawl of intermeshed limbs. “But what about them?”

“What about ’em? I hope you’re not suggesting they should join in.”

“Don’t be disgusting. But if they wake up, they’ll see us.”

So that was it. A privacy taboo, just like the one on Moldave. And apparently a strong one. Hans would not be able to do anything as long as they were cooped up in the ship with J’merlia and Kallik, even though the aliens could have nothing beyond a possible academic interest in human mating procedures.

But their indifference did not change the situation for Hans Rebka. Darya had given up.

“Too many eyes for you,” she repeated. “I know. Don’t worry about it, Hans. So how much longer before we reach Gargantua?”

“About forty hours.” He was relieved to change the subject. “I can’t stop wondering — what do you think we are going to find there?”

He looked at Darya expectantly. She had no answer, though she admitted the justice of his question. After all, she was the one who had actually seen the dark sphere gobble up Louis Nenda’s ship and head off to Gargantua. Hans had been too busy trying to stop Nenda from shooting them out of the sky. But did she really expect to find the Builders there, now that she’d had plenty of time to think about it?

For Darya, that was the ultimate question. The Builders had disappeared from the spiral arm more than five million years earlier, but she had been pursuing them in one way or another for all of her adult life. It had begun with a single Builder artifact, the Sentinel, visible from her birthworld of Sentinel Gate. Darya had first seen it as an infant. She had grown up with that shining and striated sphere glowing in her night sky. Inaccessible to humans and to all human constructs, the unreachable interior of Sentinel had come to symbolize for her the whole mystery of the lost Builders. Her conviction that Summertide was somehow co

But Hans Rebka’s question still demanded an answer. Had she become so obsessed with the Builders, and everything to do with them, that she saw Builder influence everywhere? It was not uncommon for a scientist to live with a theory for so long that it took control. Data and observations were forced to fit the theory, rather than being used to test it and if necessary reject it. How did she know she was not guilty of that same failing?

“I know what I saw, Hans. But beyond the evidence of my eyes — however you weight that — all I can offer are my own deductions, however you weight them. Can you pick up an image of Gargantua with the external sensors?”

“Should be able to.” He craned his head around. “And we ought to be able to look at it right here — we’re line-of-sight for the projectors. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a minute.”

It did not take that long. Twenty seconds at the display controls of the Summer Dreamboat gave Hans Rebka a three-dimensional image in the space above the twin berths. He carried the remote control unit over to Darya, letting her use it to pinpoint the target and zoom as she chose.

The planet sat in the center of the globe of view. And what a change since the last time that Darya had seen it. Then the light of Gargantua had been screened by the protective filters of the Dreamboat’s viewing port. The planet had been gigantic, sure enough, bulking across half the field of view, but it had also been faint, faded to a spectral shade by the brilliant torrents of light sleeting in from Mandel and Amaranth. Now Gargantua was a sphere not much bigger than Darya’s thumbnail, but it glowed like a jewel, rich oranges and ochers of high-quality zircon and hessonite against a black background scattered with faint stars. There was just a hint of banding to mark the axis of the planet’s rotation, and the four bright points of light in suspiciously accurate alignment with the equator had to be Gargantua’s major satellites. Darya knew that a thousand other sizable fragments of debris orbited closer to the planet, but from this distance they were invisible. Their paths must have become a monstrous jumble after the perturbations of periastron passage close to Mandel and Amaranth.

Not the harmony of the spheres, but a rough charivari of tangled orbits. Navigation through them would be a problem.

She studied the image, then used the remote marker to indicate a point a quarter of a radius away from the planetary terminator.

“When the ray of light first appeared, it came from just about there.” She closed her eyes for a moment, recalling what she had seen. “But it wasn’t ordinary light, or it would have been invisible in empty space. I could see it all the way, and I could follow its line right back to that point.”