Transcendence

“Others.” Graves muttered the word. His eyes flickered and his lips trembled. He nodded. He understood, Rebka was sure he did, but he seemed unable to force an answer.

“The others,” Rebka repeated. “Who else is on board the Erebus?”

Graves began to twitch, while the tendons stood out in his thin neck. He was gathering himself for some supreme effort. His lips pressed tightly together and then opened with a gasp.

“The only other — on board the Erebus is — is J’merlia.”

Rebka, tensed to receive a disturbing answer, released Graves’s head and grunted in disappointment. Graves did not know it, but he had given the one reply that proved he was no longer rational. J’merlia was dead. Rebka had seen him die with his own eyes. Of all the people who had entered the Anfract, J’merlia was the only one who absolutely could not be on board the Erebus.

“That does it.” Rebka moved to stand at Graves’s side. “Poor devil. Let’s get him where he can rest and give him a sedative. He needs medical help, but the only people who can give it are the ones who installed the interior mnemonic twin. They’re back on Miranda, a thousand light-years away. I don’t know what treatment to give him. As for the others on board, when I find ’em I’ll skin them all. There’s no way they should have left him here alone — even if he was nominally in command.”

Rebka moved to one side of Graves and gestured to Louis Nenda to take the man’s other arm. The councilor glanced from one to the other in bewilderment as they lifted him. He offered no resistance, but he could not have walked without them. His muscles had plenty of strength, but his legs did not seem to know in which direction they were supposed to move. Rebka and Nenda eased out of the door. Atvar H’sial stayed in the control room — first rule of space, never leave the ship’s bridge with no one in charge.

They took Graves to the sick bay, where Rebka placed him under medium-level sedation — he already seemed only half-conscious — and swathed him in protective webbing.

“Won’t help him much, but at least he can’t get into trouble here,” Rebka said. He tied the straps in a complex pattern. “And if he’s together enough to figure out these knots, then he’s thinking a whole lot better than he was when we brought him here.”

The two men started back toward the bridge. They were at the final branch of the corridor when they heard the click of Kallik’s steps from the other direction.

“Did you turn the Indulgence?” Rebka asked without looking at the Hymenopt. Instead of a reply in human speech, Kallik produced a high-pitched whistle and an unintelligible burst of Hymenopt clicks. Louis Nenda at once jumped to Kallik’s side. He picked up the little Hymenopt and shook her.

“What are you up to?” Rebka backed away. One just did not do that to a Hymenopt! Anyone but Louis Nenda who tried it on Kallik would face rapid death. Kallik’s short black fur — the hymantel, so prized by unwise bounty hunters — was bristling, and the yellow sting had involuntarily slipped out a couple of inches from the lower end of the stubby abdomen.

Nenda was unworried. “Hafta do it. She’s in shock, see. Gotta bring her out of it.” He banged the Hymenopt hard on top of her smooth round head with his clenched fist and unleashed a burst of clucking whistles. “I’m tellin’ her to speak human — that oughta help. She don’t know how to moan an’ groan in that. Come on, Kallik, tell me. Whatsamatter?”

“I turned the s-sh-ship.” Kallik spoke, but slowly and badly. She had regressed, back to the time when human speech had been new to her.

“Yeah. Then what?”

“I left the c-cargo hold. I began to move along the corridor. And then — then—”

“Get on with it!”

“Then—” The sting had retracted, but now the little body was shaking in Nenda’s arms. “Then I saw J’merlia. S-standing in front of me. In the corridor that led to the control room.”

“Kallik, you know that can’t be. J’merlia’s dead — you saw it happen.” But Louis Nenda’s eyes told a different story. He and Rebka exchanged looks. Impossible? Maybe. But from two quite independent sources?

“It was J’merlia. There could be no mistake. It was his voice, as well as his appearance.” Kallik was steadying. She was a supremely logical being, and any offense to logic was especially troubling to her. But the explanation in human speech was restoring her natural modes of thought. “He was about twenty meters away from me, farther along this same corridor. He called out my name, and then he spoke to me. He told me that I must go at once to the control room, that Julian Graves was in need of help.” Kallik paused and stared at Rebka. “That is true, isn’t it? And then, while I was looking straight at J’merlia…”

She stopped speaking. Every eye in her whole black circle of eyes dimmed and seemed to go out of focus at once. Nenda banged her down hard on the floor.

“Don’t you go brain-dead on me again. Spit it out, Kallik. Right now, or I’ll scatter your guts all round the room.”

Kallik shook her head. “I will say it, Master Nenda, as you command. But it is not possible. While I was staring at him, J’merlia vanished. He did not move, for I am faster than he and I would have seen and tracked any movement that he could make. I did not lose consciousness, either, not even for a moment, which was my first thought, because I was in midair, jumping toward him when he vanished. It could not be some trick of reflection, or some peculiar optical effect, because less than a second after he disappeared I stood in the spot where he had stood, and felt the difference in temperature of the floor where his legs had rested.” Kallik slumped down, all her own legs wide. “It was truly he. My friend J’merlia.”

Rebka and Nenda stared at each other.

“She’s not lying, you know,” Nenda muttered. He was talking more to himself than to Hans Rebka.

“I know. That’s what I was afraid of. It would be a lot easier if she were.” Rebka forced himself away from snarling impossibilities and back to things he knew how to handle. “You realize that’s exactly what he said.” He jerked his thumb back toward the sick bay where Julian Graves lay. “According to him, J’merlia was the only one with him on the Erebus.”

“Yeah. But we don’t have to believe that. We can check who’s here. At can sniff the central air supply, an’ if there’s anybody else on the ship she’ll get a trace of ’em. Hold a minute.” Nenda hurried off, back toward the control room.

Neither man needed to spell out the rest: If no one but Graves and J’merlia had been on the ship, then where were Darya and the others? Almost certainly, on Genizee. Which meant that the ascent of the Indulgence had stranded them there.

Hans Rebka did not wait for Nenda’s return. “Bring Master Nenda to the Indulgence as soon as he gets back from the control room,” he said. He did not ask Kallik, who was still splayed on the floor — he commanded her. He hated to treat her as a slave, when he had argued so strongly that she was not; but this was a time, if ever, when the ends justified the means. The Hymenopt simply nodded obedience, and Rebka went hurrying back to the scoutship.

Kallik had done her job in the cargo hold. The Indulgence was waiting, power recharged and command sequences set, ready to return to space. Rebka went to the open hatch. He itched to fly straight out of the hold and back to the surface of Genizee, but first he had to be sure of the situation on board the Erebus.

When Louis Nenda returned he was not alone. Atvar H’sial was right behind him, gliding through the corridors in twenty-meter leaps.

“No worries,” Nenda said, in answer to Rebka’s unasked question. “Kallik’s keeping an eye out on the bridge. She’s actin’ up some ways, but she’ll be okay for a couple of minutes.”