Summertide

Before Rebka could say anything, Perry was staring all around and shaking his head.

“I don’t know what’s going on here.” His face was puzzled. “I said we’d find trouble, and I wasn’t joking. It’s too damned quiet. And we’re less than thirty days from Summertide, the biggest one ever.”

Rebka shrugged. If Perry were playing some deep game, Rebka could not see through it. “Everything looks fine to me.”

“It does. And that’s what’s wrong.” Perry waved an arm, to take in all the scene around them. “It shouldn’t be like this. I’ve been here before at this time of year, many times. We should be seeing quakes and eruptions by now — big ones. We should feel them, under our feet. There should be ten times as much dust in the air.” He sounded genuinely confused.

Rebka nodded, then turned slowly through a full three hundred and sixty degrees, taking plenty of time for a thorough inspection of their surroundings.

Right in front of them stood the broad foot of the Umbilical. It touched the surface, but it was not held by a mechanical tether. The coupling was performed electromagnetically, field-bound to Quake’s metal-rich mantle. Perry had told him that it was necessary because of the instability of the planetary surface near Summertide. That was plausible, and consistent with Perry’s claim about the violence of the event. Why else would the Builders have avoided a real tether? But mere plausibility did not make the statement true.

Beyond the Umbilical, in the dirrection of Mandel’s setting disk, stood a brooding range of low mountains, purple-gray in the dusty air. The peaks were uniform in size and strangely regular in their spacing. From their harsh profile and the steep angle of their ascent, they had to be volcanic. But he could see no pall of smoke standing above them, nor any evidence of recent lava flows. He looked closer. The ground beneath his feet was smooth and fissure-free, with no gaps in plant growth to testify to recent fracturing of the surface.

So this was Quake, the great and terrible? Rebka had slept easy in environments ten times as threatening. Without a word he began walking toward the lake.

Perry hurried after him. “Where are you going?” He was nervous, and it was not simulated tension.

“I want to have a look at those animals. If it’s safe to do it.”

“It should be. But let me go first.” Perry’s voice was agitated as he moved on in front. “I know the terrain.”

Nice and thoughtful of you, Rebka thought. Except that I don’t see a thing in the terrain that needs knowing. The ground was marked here and there by patches of igneous outcrops and broken basaltic rubble, a sure sign of old volcanic activity, and the footing was sometimes difficult and uneven. But Rebka would have no more trouble traveling across it than Perry.

As they moved toward the water the going actually became easier. Closer to the lake lay a sward of springy dark-green ground cover that had managed to find purchase on the dry rocks. Small animals, all invertebrates, scuttled to hide away in it from the approaching strangers. The herbivores held their ground until the two men were a few meters away, then unhurriedly sidled off toward the lake. They were round-backed creatures with radial symmetry, multilegged and with cropping mouths set all around their periphery.

“You know what’s bugging me, don’t you?” Rebka asked suddenly.

Perry shook his head.

“All this.” Rebka gestured at the plant and animal life around them. “You insist that humans mustn’t come to Quake too near to Summertide. You say we can’t survive here, and I’m supposed to tell Julius Graves and the others that they are not allowed to visit, and we’ll lose the revenue they’d generate for Dobelle. But they stay here.” He pointed to the animals making their slow way to the water’s edge. “They survive, apparently with no trouble. What can they do that we can’t do?”

“Two things.” They had reached the lakeside, and Perry had for some reason lost his nervousness. “First of all, they avoid the surface of Quake during Summertide. Each one of the animals that you’ll find on Quake either dies before Summertide, and its eggs hatch after summer is all over, or else it estivates — hides away for the summer. Those herbivores are all amphibians. In a few more days they’ll go down into the lakes, dig deep into the mud at the bottom, and sleep until it’s safe to come out again. We can’t do that. At least, you and I can’t. Maybe the Cecropians can.”

“We could do something like that. We could make habitats, domes under the lakes.”

“All right. We could, but I doubt if Darya Lang and the others would agree to it. Anyway, that’s only half the story. I said they do two things. The other thing they do is, they breed fast. A big new litter every season. We can mate all we want to, every day, but we won’t match that.” Perry’s grin had no humor in it. “They have to do it here. The death rate for animals and plants on Quake is over ninety percent per year. Evolution really pushes, so they’ve adapted as far as they can adapt. Even so, nine out of every ten will die at Summertide. Are you willing to try odds like that? Would you let Darya Lang and Julius Graves risk them?”

It was a powerful argument — if Rebka were willing to accept Perry’s claim of Summertide violence. And so far he was not. A close approach to Mandel, consistent with Perry’s claim about the violence of Summertide, would exert great tidal forces on Quake. No one could doubt that. But it was not clear how much those land tides would damage the surface. Quake’s flora and fauna had survived for over forty million years. And that included dozens of Grand Conjunctions, even if there had been no humans to observe them. Why would it not easily survive another?

“Let’s go.” Hans Rebka had made up his mind. Mandel was close to setting, and he wanted to be off the planet before they were reduced to depending on Amaranth’s dimmer glow. He was convinced that Perry was not telling him everything; that the man had his own reasons for trying to keep people away from Quake. But even if Max Perry were right, Rebka could not justify closing Quake. The evidence that the world was dangerous was just not there to send back to the government of the Phemus Circle.

The arguments all seemed to be the other way round. The native animals might have trouble making it through Summertide, but they did not have human knowledge and resources. Based on what Rebka could see, he would be quite willing to spend Summertide here himself.

“We have a duty to tell people the odds,” he went on. “But we are not their guardians. If they choose to come here, knowing the dangers, we shouldn’t stop them.”

Perry hardly seemed to be listening. He was staring all around, frowning up at the sky and down at the ground and over to the distant line of hills.

“There’s no way this can happen, you know,” he said. His voice was perplexed. “Where’s it all going?”

“Where’s what all going?” Rebka was ready to leave.

“The energy. The tidal forces are pumping energy in — from Mandel and Amaranth and Gargantua. And none of it is coming out. That means there has to be some monstrous internal storage—”

He was interrupted by a flash of ruddy light from the west. Both men looked that way and saw that between them and the setting sphere of Mandel a line of dark, spreading fountains had appeared, shot with fire and rising from the distant mountains.

Seconds later the sound wave arrived; the ground shock came later yet, but the animals did not wait. At the first bright flash they were heading for the water, moving much faster than Rebka had realized they could ever manage.

“Blow out! We’ll get flying rocks!” Perry was shouting, through a rumble like thunder. He pointed to the multiple plumes. “Molten, some of ’em, and we’re within easy range. Come on.”