Graves put his hand to his head. He was getting worse; his voice was no more controllable than this thoughts. But J’merlia was merely nodding and turning to walk with Graves back to the control room.
“We must have passed each other on the journey through the annular singularities. I have been sent back to tell you that everything goes well. Captain Rebka and the others have landed, and confirm that the planet is the famous lost world of Genizee. It appears to be a peaceful and pleasant place, with no sign of danger.”
“There are no Zardalu?” With a gigantic effort Graves forced his divided brain to the single question. The mental energy required to resolve alternatives and form one thought was enough to crack his skull, or so it felt.
“We are not sure. No trace of them had been discovered when I left. But Captain Rebka decided to land only when an extensive survey from space showed that it was safe to do so.”
Even to the distracted thought processes of Julian Graves’s split brain, there seemed something wrong with that statement. “But the message drone was damaged. How did that happen? Who launched the drone? It has to be done in space. Why was there mud on it? Why did you leave the others on Genizee without a ship and return here alone? How can they be safe, when there may still be Zardalu on the planet?”
Graves cursed himself as he flopped down at the control console of the Erebus. J’merlia had a linear mind; he would be hopelessly confused by a stream of questions delivered all at once. Graves was confused by them himself. Where were they all coming from?
“I will reply to your inquiries, if you do not mind, in a rather different order from that in which they were asked.” J’merlia sat down without waiting for permission. He lifted six legs and began to click off answers on his claws. “First, I left Genizee under the direct orders of Captain Rebka. I launched the message drone for the same reason. He commanded me to take off from the planet and launch it. The drone itself suffered minor damage and became muddied on our landing on Genizee, as did the seedship, but it was not enough to affect performance. As to the safety or lack of it of Captain Rebka and the others, you know my relationship to Atvar H’sial. Do you imagine that I would ever leave her if I thought that she might be in danger, except under direct orders?”
There was something wrong with the J’merlia who gave those answers. Graves knew it. Something odd about the answers, too. Lo’tfians did not tell lies — that was well-known — but did that mean they always told the truth? Those two were logically equivalent, weren’t they? But suppose that one was ordered to tell lies. His own condition prevented him from thinking it through. His mind was splitting into pieces. He put his hands up to rub his eyes. Even they seemed to want to provide double vision. Well, why not? The optic nerve was part of the brain.
He covered his eyes with his hands and fought to concentrate. “But why did you come back? Why didn’t you send another probe here? If there are Zardalu…”
“The seedship is unarmed, Councilor. Even if it were still on Genizee, it could do nothing to protect the party from any Zardalu that may be encountered. I know that, quite certainly. I came back to help you to bring the Erebus through the singularity rings. There was no way of knowing that the probe had reached you with the information that charts the way in. We must prepare to leave at once, and bring the Erebus to orbit Genizee.”
Graves hesitated. J’merlia was right: the seedship had been defenseless. But to take the Erebus inside the singularities, surely not…
But why not? Almost the whole party was there now, anyway. Julian Graves took his hands away from his eyes, almost ready to force his mind to a decision, and found that J’merlia had not waited for one. The Lo’tfian was already working at the control console, entering an elaborate sequence of navigational instructions.
When the program was complete, J’merlia turned flight execution over to the Erebus main computer and turned his thin body to face Julian Graves. “We are on our way. In a day or less, depending on the condition of stochastic elements of our path, we will be within sight of Genizee. But this raises a new question, and one that fills me with concern. Suppose that when we reach Genizee, Captain Rebka’s group, or possibly Professor Lang’s group, have indeed discovered that the planet is the home of the Zardalu. What will we do then? Would it not be logical to bring our group away to safety, and employ the arsenals of the Erebus to exterminate the Zardalu?”
Graves considered himself lucky. He did not have to think about the last question with his poor community of a brain, because he had already thought about it long before, for days and weeks and months. The Zardalu were bloodthirsty and violent and cruel, former masters and tormentors of dozens of other intelligent races. That could not be denied. But Julius Graves had spent years working on an interspecies Council. One of the Council’s prime duties was to protect any species that had borderline or even potential intelligence. The idea of genocide, of destroying all the surviving members of a known-intelligent species, made his stomach turn over.
Revulsion and anger allowed him to generate the single response.
“I am not sure what we will do if Hans Rebka or Darya Lang’s parties find Zardalu on Genizee. But I can tell you, J’merlia, what we will definitely not do: we will not contemplate deliberate mass destruction of any species that does not threaten our species — yours, or mine, or anyone else’s — with extinction. I cannot make that point clearly enough.”
He did not know how J’merlia would react. This was not the docile, obedient J’merlia that they were all used to. This was an action-oriented, clear-thinking, decisive Lo’tfian. Graves almost expected an argument, and doubted that he was clear-headed enough to manage his end of it.
But J’merlia was leaning back in the chair, his pale eyes staring intently at Graves. “You can make that point clear enough, Councilor,” he said. “And you have made the point clear enough. You will not pursue, permit, or condone the extermination of intelligence. I hear you speak.”
As though evaluating the final summing-up of some lengthy argument, J’merlia sat nodding to himself for a few moments. Then he was away, off his seat and scurrying out of the control room. Julian Graves remained to stare after him, to review his perplexed — and oddly multiple — impressions of the past few minutes, and to wonder if he had finally become deranged enough to have imagined the whole encounter.
Except that the Erebus, beyond all argument and imaginings, was entering the region of annular singularities, the region that guarded the most famous lost world of all Lost Worlds: Genizee, home of the Zardalu.
LOST WORLDS
It’s no secret that a damned fool can ask more questions than the smartest being in the arm can answer. And yes, I am talking about Downsiders. And yes, I am talking about the Lost Worlds. They seem to have an obsession with them.
Captain Sloane — that’s how they always start, polite as could be — you claim to have traveled a lot (but there’s a little skepticism, you see, right there). Where is Genizee, the Lost World of the Zardalu?
I don’t know, I say.
Well, how about Petra, or the treasure world of Jesteen, or Skyfall or Primrose or Paladin? They know damn well that my answer has to be the same, because every one of those worlds — if they were ever real places — has been lost, all traces of their locations vanished into time.
Of course, the Downsiders would never dream of going out and looking themselves. Much better to huddle down in the mud and wonder, then pester people who have been out and seen it all, or as much of it as a body can see.
People like me.
So they say, Captain (and now they’re getting ruder), you’re full as an egg with talk, and you waffle on to anybody who’ll listen to you. But what happened to Midas, where it rains molten gold, or Rainbow Reef, where the dawn is green and the nightfall blazing scarlet and midday’s all purple? Hey? What happened to them? Or to Shamble and Grisel and Merryman’s Woe? They were once there, and now they’re not. Where did they go? You can’t answer that one? Shame on you.
I don’t let myself get mad (though it’s not easy). I burn slow, and I say, Ah, but you’re forgetting the wind.
The wind? That always gets them.
That’s right, I say, you’re forgetting the Great Galactic Trade Wind. The wind that blows through the whole galaxy, taking worlds that were once close together and pushing them gradually farther and farther apart.
They look down their noses at me, if they have noses, and say, We’ve never heard of this wind of yours.
Ah, well, I say, maybe there’s a lot you never heard of. Some people don’t call it the Galactic Trade Wind. They call it Differential Galactic Rotation.
At that point, whoever I’m talking to usually says “Huh?” or something just as bright. And I have to explain.
The whole Galaxy is like every spiral galaxy, a great big wheel, a hundred thousand light-years across, turning in space. Most of the people I talk to at least know that much. But it’s not like a Downsider wheel, with rigid spokes. It’s a wheel where the spiral arms closer to the galactic center, and all the stars in them, turn at a faster rate than the ones farther out. So you take a star — for example, Sol. And you take another well-known object — say, the Crab Nebula in Taurus, six thousand light-years farther out toward the galactic rim. You find that Sol is moving around the galactic center about thirty-five kilometers a second faster than the Crab. They’re separating, slow but sure, both moving under the influence of the Galactic Trade Wind. (And the wind can work both ways. If you drop behind, because you’re farther out from the center, all you have to do is fly yourself in closer to the center, and wait. You’ll start to catch up, because now you’re moving faster.)
But what about the Crab Nebula?, ask some of my Downsider friends, the ones who have understood what I’m talking about. It’s a natural object; you can’t fly it around like a ship. Will it ever come back to the vicinity of Sol?
Sure it will come back, I say. But it’ll take a while. The Crab will be close to Sol in another couple of billion years.
And then their eyes pop, assuming they have eyes, and they say, Two billion! None of us will be around then.
And I tell them, That’s all right, I’m not sure I will be, either. In fact, some nights I’m not sure I’ll be around next morning.
But what I think is, you Downsiders — as usual — are asking the wrong question. What I’d like to know about isn’t the Lost Worlds, it’s the Lost Explorers. What happened to Aghal H’seyrin, the crippled Cecropian who flew the disrupt loop through the eye of the Needle Singularity? We had one message from her — we know she survived the passage — but she never came back. Or where did Inigo M’tumbe go, after his last planetfall on Llandiver? He sent a message, too, about a “bright braided collar” that he was on his way to explore. No one has ever seen it or him. And what do you make of the last signal from Chinadoll Pas-farda, rolling up the black-side edge of the Coal Sack on a continuous one-gee acceleration, bound, as she sa