Resurgence

“Right.” Nenda paused for a moment—for more communication, Rebka suspected, with Atvar H’sial. “One dark star, small enough and dense enough to be a white dwarf, but drained of all its internal energy by some process we do not understand. Forty-seven planets, just as cold. Nothing living or able to live on them, at least in any form known to us. And one other oddity. The biggest of the planets in the region where you might expect to find life in a normal system is a monster, bigger than the star it’s goin’ around, but it doesn’t have the strong gravitational field to go with it. We detected all kinds of smaller bodies in nearby orbits, where the region ought to have been swept clean. The big planet is also the coldest of the lot, impossibly cold. We are tryin’ to build up a detailed picture of the surface, but from this distance that will be a long job. As for explanations, we don’t have any. This is all on a scale to suggest the work of the Builders, but we don’t believe the Builders have been active in this system.”

Almost from Nenda’s first sentence, Hans Rebka noticed Darya Lang stirring in her seat. At first she was nodding agreement, but at Nenda’s final words and his mention of the Builders, she burst out, “No! Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

While Louis Nenda stared at her, apparently more in surprise than annoyance, she went on, “Oh, I don’t mean most of what you said—I came to many of the same conclusions. This system isn’t our final destination, it’s a halfway-station used by a lying Polypheme, probably one Bose jump from where we really want to go. But Louis, when you say the Builders haven’t been at work here, you are wrong.”

Nenda opened his mouth, said, “Well—” and paused. Atvar H’sial had reached out to place one black paw on his shoulder, and was leaning over him so closely that the Cecropian’s pleated pouch touched the top of his dark hair.

After a few seconds Nenda nodded. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He turned back to Darya Lang. “Atvar H’sial says she knows the Lang Universal Artifact Catalog—all editions—forward, backward and sideways. And in none of those, dealing with more than twelve hundred artifacts in the Orion Arm, do you anywhere suggest that the Builders destroyed a whole stellar system. Why are you changing your tune now? Is it just because we’re in the Sag Arm?”

“No. I’d say the same if we were back in our local arm. Louis, you had all the evidence staring you in the face, you just ignored it. The planet you mentioned is amazingly cold. In fact, according to the physics that we know, it is as you said impossibly cold. Colder than the microwave background radiation of the universe, which means there must be some mechanism at work on that planet to get rid of incident radiation falling onto it all the time from space. Otherwise it must increase in temperature to match its surroundings. Mentally, I tagged the place as Iceworld as soon as I made the first measurements. It’s huge, just as you say, but it has hardly any gravitational field. You realized that, because it hadn’t swept a region clear around its orbit. But you didn’t take the next step. If you had measured the orbital periods of Iceworld’s satellites—it has seven of them, all small—you could have calculated the planet’s mass. I did that. The result is tiny, something you would expect from something one hundredth the diameter. What does that tell you?”

Nenda shook his head. He seemed to be waiting for Atvar H’sial to provide an answer, but a survival team member—one of the women, Lara Quistner—got in first. “Big diameter, small mass. Are you suggesting that your Iceworld is hollow?”

“I am. And that has other implications, ones that you don’t know because you weren’t with us on our earlier explorations. First, a hollow object that size can’t be created by any natural processes that we understand. Second, we were led once before to a system and a giant planet, Gargantua, that seemed totally dead. But one of its moons, Glister, was hollow, and the evidence of Builder activity was inside it—including a transport vortex that could take you to other places. I bet that’s happening here. If we want to reach our true destination, we have to go down to the big planet and explore below the surface.”

Julian Graves said gently, “Professor Lang, even if you are right you didn’t answer Atvar H’sial’s question. Did the Builders destroy this whole stellar system, in order to make a single artifact on Iceworld?”

“I don’t know. But Atvar H’sial is correct, in no other case have we found evidence that the Builders did such a thing.”

“Not the Builders, Professor Lang. Then who?”

“Others. Destroyers, Voiders, Dead-Zoners, call them what you like. Whoever or whatever it is that the Marglotta believe is at work destroying the Sag Arm. Councilor, I have spent my life studying the Builders and their actions. What we find here does not match my instincts.”

“But you may be wrong.”