Transcendence

She stood in silence for a few seconds, savoring the moment and waiting to be noticed. Then she realized that might take a long time. They were deep in discussion.

She stepped forward to stand right between Nenda and Rebka, where she could not be ignored.

“Kallik and I know how to find the Zardalu!” A touch of sensationalism, maybe even a little smugness — but no more than their discovery deserved. “If Dulcimer will take us into the Anfract, we know where we should go.”

Nenda and Rebka moved, but only so that they could still see each other and talk around her. It was Julian Graves who turned to face her, with a ringing, “Then I wish that you would bring it to their attention.” He gestured at Nenda and Rebka. “Because the conversation here is certainly going nowhere.”

At that moment Darya became aware of the level of tension in the room. If she had not been so full of herself, she would have read it from the postures. The air was charged with emotion, as invisible and as lethal as superheated steam.

“What’s wrong?” But she was already guessing. Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka were close to blows. Atvar H’sial hovered close-by, rearing up menacingly on her two hindmost limbs.

“It’s him.” Rebka stabbed an accusing finger an inch short of Nenda’s chest. “Tells us he’ll take us to somebody who can pilot us in, then wastes our energy and money and days of our time getting to Bridle Gap and arguing with that lying corkscrew. And then that’s what we get for our Anfract approach routes.”

He was pointing at the big display. Darya stared at it in perplexity. It was not the Anfract she had been studying. In addition to the usual features, the 3-D image was filled with yellow lines snaking into the center of the anomaly. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Take a close look, and you’ll see for yourself. Like to fly that one?” He pointed to a wriggling trajectory that abruptly terminated in a tiny sphere of darkness. “See where it ends? Follow it, and you’ll run yourself right into the middle of a singularity. No more Erebus, no more crew.”

“You’re as dumb as a Ditron.” Nenda stepped closer to Rebka, pushing Darya aside as though she did not exist. “If you’d just listen to me for a minute—”

“Now wait a second!” The days when Darya would let herself be ignored were over. She pushed back and grabbed Rebka’s arm. “Hans, how do you know that the Polypheme suggests those as approach paths? For heaven’s sake, why don’t you ask him what he’s proposing to do?”

“Exactly!” Nenda said, but Rebka roared him down.

“Ask him! Don’t you think I want to ask him? He’s on board, we know that, but that’s all we know. He’s vanished! That brain-burned bum, as soon as we started to talk about Anfract approach routes, and safety factors, and time-varying fields, he excused himself for a minute. No one has seen him since.”

“And it’s your damned fault!” Nenda was as loud as Rebka, pushing Darya to one side again and glaring at him eyeball-to-eyeball. “Didn’t I tell you not to let Tally do that stupid data download from the Indulgence? I warned you all.”

Two long, jointed limbs came swooping down, grasped Nenda and Rebka by the back of their shirts, and drew them easily apart. Julian Graves nodded gratefully to Atvar H’sial. “Thank you.” He turned to Rebka. “Louis Nenda indeed warned you.”

“Warned him of what?” Darya was tired of this.

Nenda shook himself free of Atvar H’sial’s grasp and slumped into a seat. “Of the obvious thing.” His voice was exasperated. “Dulcimer makes his living as a pilot. But he’s a Chism Polypheme, so that means he’s paranoid and expects people to try to rob him. His stored displays are exactly how I’d expect them to be — totally useless! He has all the real stuff hidden in his head, where no one can steal it. There’s nothing but lies in the data bank. Pilfer from him and use that to fly with, and you’re a dead duck.”

“With respect, Atvar H’sial would like to make a statement,” J’merlia put in. He had been translating the argument for the Cecropian. “Dulcimer is a liar, says Atvar H’sial, but he also has low cu

“Why?” Graves asked. He bit back the urge to order J’merlia to stop acting like a slave to Atvar H’sial. J’merlia was a free being now — even if he didn’t want to be.

“In order to divide our group against itself,” the Lo’tfian translator went on, “as it has just been divided by the fighting of Louis Nenda and Captain Rebka. Dulcimer’s influence is maximized when we are not united. Also, he wished us to realize what we seem to be proving for ourselves, by our substitution of emotion for thought: without the Polypheme, we have no idea how to penetrate the Anfract. You have been playing Dulcimer’s game.” Atvar H’sial’s blind white head swung to survey the whole group. “If this battle does not cease, Dulcimer will surely return — to gloat over our disarray.”

Atvar H’sial was getting through — Darya knew it, because Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka would not look at each other.

“Hell, we weren’t fightin’,” Nenda muttered. “We were just havin’ a discussion about where we want to go.”

“That’s right,” Rebka added. “We wouldn’t know what to tell Dulcimer, even if he was here.”

“Yes, we would!” It had taken a long time, but Darya could finally make her point. “If Dulcimer can get us to the Anfract, Kallik and I can give him a destination inside it.”

At last she had their attention. “If you’ll sit still for a few minutes, without fighting, I’ll show you the whole thing. Or Kallik will — it was really her idea.” She glanced at Kallik, but the little Hymenopt sank to the floor, while her ring of black eyes flickered in the signal of negation. “All right, if you don’t want to, I’ll do it. And I can use this same display.”

Darya took over the control console, while the others moved to sit where they could easily see. They watched silently as she outlined her own analysis of geodesics around the Anfract, mated it with Kallik’s sifting of planetary sightings within the complex, and carried on to provide a summary of computed locations.

“Five or six possibles,” she finished. “But luckily previous expeditions have provided good-quality images of each one. Kallik and I reviewed them all. We agree on just one prime candidate. This one.”

She was zooming into the Anfract display along one of her computed light-paths, a dizzying, contorted trajectory with no apparent logic to it. A star became visible, and then, as Darya changed the display scale and the apparent speed of approach, the field of view veered away from the swelling disk of the sun. A bright dot appeared.

“Planet,” Julian Graves whispered. “If you are right, we are looking at something lost for more than eleven mille

A planet, and yet not a planet. They were closing still, and the point of light was splitting.

“Not just one world,” Darya said. “More of a doublet, like Opal and Quake.”

“Not too like either one, I hope.” The anger had gone out of Hans Rebka and he was staring at the display with total concentration. As the world images drew closer he could see that there were differences. Quake and Opal had been fraternal twins, the same size though grossly dissimilar in appearance. The Anfract doublet was more like a planet and its single huge moon, the one blue-white and with a surface hazily visible between swirls of cloud cover, the other, just as bright though only half the size, glittering like burnished steel. Darya’s display in accelerated time showed the gleaming moon, tiny even at highest magnification, whirling around the planet at dizzying speed, against a fixed backdrop of steady points of light. Rebka peered at the planet and its moon, not sure what it was that forced him to such intense examination.