Resurgence

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.”