The following facts were deemed too anecdotal for the formality of the
Universal Catalog
(Subclass: Sapients). Few beings of the spiral arm, however, would dispute them:
AN ADULT HYMENOPT HAS REFLEXES TEN TIMES AS FAST AS ANY HUMANS.
A HYMENOPT CAN RUN A HUNDRED METERS IN LESS THAN TWO SECONDS.
USED IN CONCERT, A HYMENOPT'S EIGHT TRIPLE-JOINTED LEGS WILL PROPEL HER TEN METERS INTO THE AIR UNDER TWO STANDARD GRAVITIES.
THE RETRACTED YELLOW STING IN THE END OF A HYMENOPT'S STUBBY ABDOMEN CAN BE READIED IN A FRACTION OF A SECOND TO DELIVER STIMULANTS, ANESTHETICS, HALLUCINOGENS, OR LETHAL NEUROTOXINS. THEY ARE EFFECTIVE ON ALL KNOWN INTELLIGENT ORGANISMS.
WITH VOLUNTARILY REDUCED METABOLISM, A HYMENOPT CAN SURVIVE FOR FIVE MONTHS WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER; ENCYSTED, SHE WILL ENDURE FOR FOUR TIMES AS LONG.
A HYMENOPT IS AS INTELLIGENT AS A CECROPIAN OR A HUMAN, WITH MORE MENTAL STAMINA THAN EITHER.
Kallik, of course, knew all these things. And yet it never occurred to her that her own slave status was in any way unnatural. In fact, she thought it inevitable. Her race memory extended back well over ten thousand years, to the time when every Hymenopt had been a slave.
Hymenopt race memory lacked the precision of nerve-cell memory. The few billion bits available for its total storage reduced recollection to a mere caricature of the original direct experience. Yet the brain, insistent on offering race memories in the same format as other experiences, clothed the skeleton of recollection in a synthetic flesh of its own creation.
Thus, Kallik "remembered" the long enslavement of her species as a series of visual flashes; but no amount of effort would make those images detailed. If she made the attempt, the result was the product of her own imagination.
She could make a picture in her mind of the Zardalu, the land-cephalopod masters who had ruled the thousand worlds of the Zardalu Communion until the Great Rising. If she thought hard, she could make specific images: of stony beaks, big and strong enough to crush a Hymenopt's body . . . but she could not see how they fitted to the Zardalu body. Of huge, round eyes . . . but they were floating free and disembodied, high above her head. Of hulking bodies, girthed with supporting straps and slick with fatty secretions that allowed the Masters to survive on land . . . but the legs that carried those bodies were vague shadow legs, undefined in size, color, or number.
She had only the most confused memory of the disappearance of the Zardalu: her mind fed back a whirl of flying bodies, a green fire, a world turned black, a sun exploding. And then, great calm; an absence of all Zardalu images.
For Kallik's social class, the Great Rising and the vanishing of the tyrant Zardalu brought little change. She had been born a Worker; had she remained on the Homeworld she would have remained one. Her role would always have been Worker, rather than Regent, Recorder, Defender, Feeder, or Breeder. She had been bred for slavery, born for slavery, raised for slavery, and sold for slavery. Nothing made her so uncomfortable as a total absence of masters. She
needed
them—humans, Cecropians, or Hymenopts.
The disappearance of Lang and Rebka stimulated her to frantic activity. She moved at once to make a low-altitude survey of the surface of Glister, traversing the slowly rotating planetoid on a path that would allow a close inspection of every square meter.
The survey took over an hour. It was wasted time. Kallik remained convinced that Glister was hollow, but the sphere showed no trace of external structure. Nothing suggested a way to reach the hidden interior. If fact, if Kallik had not
seen
, with her own multiple pairs of black eyes, that sparkling cloud absorbed into the surface, she would have judged Glister's exterior totally impermeable.
When the futile ground survey was over Kallik raised her eyes again to scan the heavens far above the ship. She was no nearer finding Rebka and Lang, and—ominously—the Phages were no longer remaining at a safe distance. The presence of the
Have-It-All
, moving in its survey orbit around the planetoid, seemed to madden them. Three times Kallik had seen a Phage dropping in on a trajectory that carried it to within a couple of kilometers above the ship. Each approach came a little closer. Now she could see two more Phages, dropping in low.
She returned the
Have-It-All
to the surface of Glister, roughly where they had first found it, and went to her own quarters. The time for tentative measures was past. She selected equipment and carried it down from the ship to the surface. It would measure the E-M field associated with Glister and compute an external field to cancel it in magnitude and phase.
She sent a terse message to Opal, explaining what she was about to do. She could not signal to J'merlia, since Dreyfus-27 was still shielded by the mass of Gargantua.
Kallik dragged the field generator and inhibitor forty meters away from the
Have-It-All
. She had one more problem to solve. If she focused the field on the surface with a five- or ten-meter effective range, the device itself would sink through into Glister if the surface became fluid or gaseous. The only way to prevent that was to run a pair of lines attached to the generator right around the body of the sphere, one following a geodesic around the "equator" and the other a geodesic over the "poles." Downward forces would then be held by tension in the cables, and supported by the surface strength of the whole of Glister.
Kallik paused for thought.
The lines would be supported, unless of course the
local
field cancellation somehow caused a
global
cancellation. Then Glister would become a ball of gas or liquid, and Kallik, the
Have-It-All
, and the
Summer Dreamboat
would plunge together into the unknown interior.
A Hymenopt had no shoulders to shrug. Instead, Kallik clucked and chirped softly to herself while she made the final connections of the thin, dislocation-free cables to the field generator. She was a fatalist. So Glister might become liquid. Well, no one ever promised that life would be risk-free. She hurried back to the
Have-It-All
and left a message for J'merlia on the recorder of the ship, the equivalent of "So long, it's been nice knowing you." If she returned safely, she could erase it.
She turned on the power, stood back, and watched.
The result was at first disappointing. The generator was a compact device, operating with microwave energy beamed from the
Have-It-All
. There was nothing to show that it was in operation, and the equipment stood exactly as she had left it, with no sound or movement.
Then she heard it; a faint creaking of the thin, tight-strung cables, protesting as they took up the strain of the generator's weight. The unit itself stood on three solid legs, but now the bottom few centimeters of those legs were invisible. They had sunk through into the surface of Glister.
Kallik moved cautiously toward the field generator. Its position was stable, moving neither downward nor upward. She touched one of the taut support lines, estimating the tension. From the feel of it, the generator would have dropped right on through without them. The surface looked subtly different for a radius of about five meters from the field's center, where the support lines bent downward and disappeared.
Kallik reached down. Her forelimb penetrated the gray surface, but she felt nothing.
She had brought with her from the ship half-a-dozen spent power canisters. She lobbed one to land by the field generator. The surface did not change in appearance, but the metal canister vanished at once and without a trace. The absence of ripples around the point of disappearance argued for a gaseous rather than a liquid region around the generator.
Kallik retreated a couple of steps. So it would swallow a power canister easily, and perhaps a Hymenopt with no more difficulty. But was the canceled field zone deep enough to provide true access to the interior? Or did it come to a solid bottom, a few meters down?
Kallik knew that she would not find answers by standing and thinking about it.
She went back to the ship and procured another length of cable, securing it first to a brace on the
Have-It-All
's main hull and then cinching it around her own midriff. If someone came along and decided to fly the
Have-It-All
off on an interplanetary mission while Kallik was down inside Glister, she would be in deep trouble.
But she was in deep trouble anyway.
She moved to the edge of the zone of change. For a few seconds she paused there, hesitating. There was no guarantee that what she was doing would help Darya Lang and Hans Rebka—still less that it was the
best
way to help them. If there was a better solution, it was her duty to find it.
As she stood thinking there was a
whoosh!
of disturbed air not far overhead. It was a Phage, hurtling by no more than fifty meters from the surface. The dark maw was closed, but it could open in a few seconds.
Kallik whistled an invocation to Ressess-tress, the leading non-deity of the Hymenopts' official atheism. She blinked all her eyes, stepped forward, and dropped through into the impalpable surface of Glister.
The
Incomparable
—incomparably rattly, rusty, cumbersome, and smelly—was approaching Gargantua. Birdie Kelly and Julius Graves focused their attention on the satellites and waited for a detailed view of Glister itself, while E. C. Tally stared steadily at a display of the giant planet. He had been sitting silently for fifteen hours, since the moment when the
Incomparable
's sensors had provided their first good look at Gargantua.
That was fine with Birdie Kelly. Tally's designers had recognized that the embodied computer's body would need rest, but apparently his inorganic brain functioned continuously. Over the past three days, Birdie had been wakened from sound sleep a dozen times with a touch and a polite "May I speak?"
Eventually Birdie had lost it. "Damn it, Tally.
No more questions.
Why don't you go and ask Graves something for a change? Julius and Steven between 'em know ten times as much as I do."
"No, Commissioner Kelly, that is not true." E. C. Tally shook his head, practicing the accepted human gesture for dissent and the conventional human pause before offering a reply. "They know much more than ten times as much as you do. Perhaps one hundred times? Let me think about that."
The first sight of Gargantua had kept him quiet for a while. But now he was perking up and coming out of his reverie over by the display screens. To Birdie's relief, though, he was turning to Julius Graves.
"If I may speak: with respect to the communications that we have received from Darya Lang and from Kallik. Professor Lang suggests that Glister is a Builder artifact, and Kallik agrees. Does any other evidence suggest the presence of Builder activity in the vicinity of Gargantua?"
"No. The nearest artifact to Gargantua is the Umbilical, connecting Quake and Opal." The voice was Steven Graves's. "And it is the only one reported in the Mandel stellar system."
"Thank you. That is what my own data banks show, but I wondered if there might be inadequacies, as there have been in other areas." Tally reached out and tapped the screen, where Gargantua filled the screen. "Would you please examine this and offer your opinion?"
His index finger was squarely on an orange-and-umber spot below Gargantua's equator.
"The bright oval?" Graves asked. He looked for only a moment, then turned his attention to the other screen, where the sensors were set for analysis of a volume of space surrounding Glister. "I'm sorry. I have no information about that."
But to his own great amazement, Birdie did. He finally knew something that Graves did not! "It's called the Eye of Gargantua," he burst out. "It's a great big whirlpool of gases, a permanent hurricane about forty thousand kilometers across." He pointed to the screen. "You can even see the vortices on the image, trailing away from it on both sides."
"I can see them. Do you know for how long the Eye of Gargantua has existed?"
"Not really. But it's been around for as long as the Dobelle system has been colonized. Thousands of years. When people came out here exploring for minerals, ages ago, the survey teams all took pictures of it. Every kids' book talks about it and has a drawing of it. It's a famous bit of the stellar system, one of the 'natural wonders' you learn about in school."
"You are speaking metaphorically. I learned nothing in school, for I did not attend it." E. C. Tally frowned. He had been experimenting with that expression as a way of indicating a paradox or dichotomy of choice, and he felt the look had reached a satisfactory level of performance. "But knowledge is not the issue. The Eye of Gargantua should not be described to children as one of the natural wonders of the stellar system. For a good reason: it is not one."
"Not one
what
?" Birdie cursed himself. He should have known better than to have jumped into a conversation with Tally.
"The Eye of Gargantua is not a natural wonder of the stellar system. Because it is not
natural
."
"Then what the blazes is it?"
"I do not know." Tally attempted another human gesture, a shrug of the shoulders. "But I know what it is not. I have been calculating continuously for the past fifteen hours, with all plausible boundary conditions. The system that we see is not a stable solution of the time-dependent, three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation for gaseous motion. It should have dissipated itself, in weeks or months. In order for the Eye of Gargantua to exist, some large additional source of atmospheric circulation must be present right there." He touched the screen. "At the center of the eye, where you can see the vortex—"
"Phages!" Julius Graves broke in excitedly. "They're there all right. We're getting an image of fragments around Glister, but it's not like the one that Rebka and Lang sent back from their first sighting. The cloud around it extends all the way down to the surface. If those are all Phages . . ."