"I agree." Atvar H'sial could find no space big enough for her to turn, so she was forced to retreat backwards along the aisle. "What they were producing is unclear, but that knowledge would probably tell us little or nothing. Also, although this machinery appears of sophisticated design and enjoys a high level of automation, I see nothing that we might wish to remove for our own commercial advantage. These machines confirm the notion that Marglot supported a civilization with good technological capability. However, when disaster came, that technology was unable to save the life of even a single Marglotta."
Sinara had been unusually quiet. Now she said, "Louis, are we in danger?"
"Not right this minute. Whatever did for the Marglotta here has been and gone. But we'd better be real careful when we go other places. I'm 'specially thinkin' about those bursts of radio noise we picked up from orbit. They sounded like gibberish, but nothing I've ever seen in nature produces that kind of output."
"One of those sources is close to E.C. Tally's location. He has probably had dealings with them. Won't we need to do the same?"
"Yeah. That's a real comfort. We should get rollin'. Tally's across at the opposite edge of the warm side. We'll take a look as we go, an' see if there's anything interesting at lower altitude that Archimedes didn't spot from orbit."
What they saw was mostly nothing at all. Louis hadn't thought through the tangled geometry of Marglot. Twenty minutes after they were airborne they were still flying over the warm hemisphere, but they were coming to the day/night dividing line. Louis stared down as twilight faded to night and the landscape below became a pale shadow. It might be warm down there, even hot, but soon it would be lit only by the "moonlight" of the sun's radiation reflected from the giant world of M-2.
He could just about make out the difference between land and water. The image intensifiers on board the pinnace had not been designed for this kind of work, and they did little better than human eyes. Claudius's great single optic would probably see more, but the Polypheme remained at his most uncooperative. Despite Nenda's assurance that nothing valuable had been found in the underground Marglotta factory, it was obvious that Claudius did not believe him.
As the pinnace sped around the curve of the planet toward the Hot Pole, clouds covered everything below. Somehow that lessened the level of frustration. Seeing nothing because you were not trying was better than peering, guessing, and cursing.
"I receive suit signals," Atvar H'sial said suddenly. "Six of them, and all derive from the same location."
"Yeah. I guess they can't go any place. We're pretty close to passing over the Hot Pole. Halfway to Tally."
"Will they be able to detect our presence?"
"I don't think so. They'll be sending like mad, but not able to hear much. But how the blazes did Tally get so far away from all the others?"
"I would like the answer to a different question: What strange skill or luck brought them here ahead of us, when there is no sign of a ship, either on the surface or up in orbit?"
"I'm tellin' you, At, Marglot is one weird place. If I didn't know better, I'd swear the whole place had to be a Builder artifact itself. Four poles, and a bigger magnetic field than any planet has a right to."
"You are making an unwarranted assumption, namely, that Marglot is
not
an artifact. Since we arrived here, I have been of the opinion that Marglot either is itself a Builder artifact, or it is intimately related to one."
"How come you never bothered to tell me that before?"
"To encumber another with an unlikely theory when all substantial evidence for it is lacking is not the Cecropian way."
"You think you got evidence now?"
"I do. We possess an additional fact which tilts the balance in favor of speaking. The Marglotta who went to Miranda feared that they were in danger because of possible Builder action. Now the Marglotta, or at least those on this planet, are all dead."
"But we're not. How do you explain that?"
"Again, I had formed an idea too vague to offer as hypothesis. However, since you ask: it is my suspicion that we have arrived here in a time interval that separates two phases of activity. The first phase led to the rapid or instantaneous extinction of animal life on Marglot."
"Something sure as hell did. What's the second phase?"
"I offer no conjecture as to when it may happen; but the second phase will extinguish the central star, and turn this whole system into one as dead as that which greeted our arrival in the Sagittarius Arm."
Louis glanced up at M-2, as though to confirm that it still stood close to full-moon phase reflecting the light of the sun. "At, you're a real bundle of joy. Next time I ask you what you've been thinkin', remind me that I'd probably rather not know."
He said nothing more, but under his control the engines changed their tone. The pinnace flew faster and faster over the dim-lit terrain beneath.
The darkness deepened. They were still on the night side, away from the sun. As they circled the planet, M-2 hung lower in the sky, providing weaker reflected sunlight to the pinnace.
Louis stared back at the gas-giant planet. "It's gonna be awful dark when we get to the place where Tally is sittin', and daylight will still be hours and hours away."
"Are you suggesting that we should delay our landing, and hover until dawn?"
"No way!"
"I thought not. Since the pinnace can land as well in light or dark, delay offers neither theoretical nor practical advantage."
"Remind me not to tell you what
I'm
thinkin', either. You'll have me as miserable as Claudius if we keep this up."
But in fact, Louis was already feeling his spirits rise. Soon they would be on the ground again, with a chance for action and maybe violence. People like Darya Lang could sit around for years and just think, but there had never been time in Louis's life to get used to that sort of thing. Get in trouble, whack a few heads, get out of trouble—
that
he could understand.
He turned around and winked at Sinara. "Time to close suits, sweetie. We'll be on the ground in a few minutes." To Claudius he added, "You can keep yours open if you like. You'd be a lot more entertaining rollin' around and screamin' in agony."
The low-altitude radar had picked out a place for a landing: a flat hilltop, part of it clear of everything but random patches of old ice. Louis examined the radar image of the ground ahead as the pinnace drifted in. He changed the glide angle a fraction of a degree.
After that he didn't need to work the controls at all. Louis folded his arms and leaned back. The ship touched down gently, and slid to a halt as smoothly and unobtrusively as a Karelian hostess picking your pocket.
Ben Blesh burned.
At the Hot Pole, bathed in the warm outflow from the gas-giant world to which Marglot was tethered by an invisible gravitational string, summer reigned perpetual. With the sun hidden by clouds, day and night temperatures differed by only a few degrees. A human could not ask for a more placid and comfortable setting.
But Ben was burning up. He was not feverish. His suit would not permit such a thing. With its controlled flow of drugs into his body, it could stabilize elements of his physical condition. But it could not determine his state of mind. The source of heat that he felt was a fiery self-hatred and disgust coming from within. He had become a burden to the expedition, rather than a cherished asset. Others might excuse his behavior on the surface of Iceworld; he never could.
They had treated him kindly and gently. Hans Rebka and Torran Veck had cleaned the mummified fragments from the inside of the legged vehicle, then rearranged the interior better to serve human needs. They had carried him to a makeshift bed there, despite his assertion that he was perfectly able to walk and manage the couple of steps up. They had told him to rest and conserve his strength, and to tell them if he needed anything. They had asked him how he was feeling.
He had lied to them.
And then they had left, and forgotten his existence. Except for occasional brief appearances to check on his condition, everyone ignored him. He had his suit open as far as he could without interfering with its medical functions, and he watched the other five through the transparent windows of the vehicle. They gathered in a ring, talking intensely to each other and gesturing in various directions. Clearly, they were making definite plans, and he was no part of them.
He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, two of the party had vanished.
It was the suit, deciding that he would benefit from a nap. It knew what it was doing from a medical point of view, because unless he moved he felt no trace of pain from his arm or his ribs. Even so, it was infuriating to have so little control over his own body.
He closed his eyes again, and this time when he awoke the whole group had disappeared. Where were they? Exploring—without him? As he watched, the ground twenty meters ahead began to tremble. The air above it seemed to thicken and shiver. A ghostly outline of a sphere formed. It hovered for a few minutes, then gradually faded. The earth once again became silent. Nothing moved, anywhere in the landscape.
Hallucination? That was not recorded as a side effect of any of the suit's medications. What he had just seen had to be real. Guardian of Travel, true to its word, had opened a transfer field leading back to the middle of Iceworld. It would open "at regular intervals." What did that mean to something like Guardian of Travel? Once a day, once a year, once a millennium? Maybe he had seen its only appearance in a million years.
Ben stared and stared, but the shimmering sphere did not return. He closed his eyes again, and when he opened them the brighter glow in the clouds that marked the sun's position had changed. It stood lower in the sky.
Soon afterwards, Darya Lang climbed into the car.
"How are you?" she said. It was what they all said when they came in to check his condition—that, and little more. But this time Darya went on, "We've been clocking the rate of movement of the sun, and in another two hours it will be dark. We can't possibly all fit into this car, and Teri Dahl has found a much better place for us to spend the night."
"I saw the transfer field again, the one that links this world with the interior of Iceworld."
"Did you? That's interesting." But Darya was not listening, because she at once went on, "Ben, what I'm going to do may hurt you. I have to walk us to the place that Teri Dahl found. I'll keep the car's movements as smooth as possible, but let me know if you feel any discomfort."
Discomfort? Ben felt rage. He wished that he could be anywhere but here. To everyone else in the party he was a useless dead weight. He had missed his chance. He could have walked thirty meters to the transfer field. Given the choice he would rather be back in the middle of Iceworld, talking to Guardian of Travel. They had left before learning everything that the ancient Builder construct might be able to tell them. There was some sort of super-vortex at the heart of this very planet. Suppose that Ben had asked to be sent there, rather than to the surface? That might have thrown him a million or a billion lightyears. It might have killed him—Guardian of Travel had not described it as a transport vortex. So it killed him. In his present mood he didn't care.
"Are you feeling all right?" Darya's voice itself seemed to come from a distance of a million lightyears. The walking car had reached the top of the hill and was making its slow way down the other side.
"If you mean, do I hurt, I don't." Ben saw towering objects ahead, shaped like the truncated cones that dotted the area where they had arrived. But these were ten times the size. "If you mean, do I feel pleased at the idea I'm going to be spending the night inside this crapheap, I still don't."
"You won't be. None of us will."
The car was lumbering toward one of the squat towers. Darya halted it ten meters away.
"Can you walk? If not I'll get some help."
"I can walk."
Or die trying
. Ben eased himself to an upright position and carefully climbed out of the car. Now his right side did hurt, no doubt about it. Maybe that was a good thing. He had heard that when broken bones were knitting together it was the most painful time. True or not, he moved like an old man.
"A few more steps." Darya was on one side of him, and now Hans Rebka walked on the other. He brushed away their offers of help.
The outside of the cone structure was an overlapping layer of giant leaves, each one as tall as a human and much wider. As Ben shambled forward, Teri Dahl pulled one leaf aside and gestured him through.
"Home, sweet home, Ben. At least for the time being. In you go. It's safe and dry."
He saw that she and the others were not wearing suits, and he envied them. He would love to get out of his own, even though he knew that would be a disaster. It was working hard on his behalf.
The layers of great leaves ran four deep. Once past them Ben stood in a wide space, dimly lit by light diffusing in from high above. The structure was supported by a thick central trunk at least a meter wide. The floor was dry, proof that the outer leaf layers were dense enough to keep out the rain that seemed to fall every few hours. The floor was bare, but not naturally so. Someone had been busy with housekeeping of an unusually gruesome kind. A stack of small mummified bodies stood at the far side of the clearing.
"Don't worry. We'll get them out of here in the morning." Teri Dahl had followed Ben in and seen what he was looking at. "They're not Marglotta, they're some form of wild animal. We think they made those, and they probably lived up there."
Ben turned his head back, feeling the pull on his ribs as he did so. Ten meters above him, the inside of the hollow cone bore drooping interlaced layers of thick white fibers, spreading out from the central trunk and connecting to the outer leaves. Above them, Ben could see bunches of rounded globes, glowing golden-orange even in the faded light, each one as big as his fist.