Resurgence

“I’ve heard something about that.” Lara Quistner glanced across to Hans Rebka and lowered her voice. “They say that all the planets of the Phemus Circle are poor and primitive, and all the men are totally sex-mad. Is it true?”

If you’re asking about my recent experience, forget it. Hans and I haven’t looked each other in the eye for weeks. And if you have ideas about him, get in line. “The worlds I’ve seen in the Phemus Circle were certainly poverty-stricken compared with some rich planet like Miranda.” It was a good, neutral answer. Darya wondered what rumors Lara Quistner might have heard. “As for the men, you’d have to find out for yourself. Someday, maybe you will. In my experience, they are sex-mad—and so are the women of the Phemus Circle. On some of the planets they have to reproduce whenever and however they can, in order to maintain a population at all. But at the same time the men can be prudish. Sometimes the slightest detail will turn off their interest in sex.”

Which was quite as far as Darya intended to go on that particular subject, regardless of her personal data base. She had been keeping an eye on the two men, and saw that they had wrapped up their conversation and were over by the autochef. They were poking at the controls. Darya winced. Maybe Ben Blesh knew what he was doing, but Hans Rebka’s attempts at food programming were disastrous. Being raised on Teufel a man couldn’t afford to be picky. She went on, “I think that the big planet, Iceworld, proves that the Builders were once here in the Sag Arm. It has all the earmarks of a Builder artifact—too light for its size, far too cold to be natural. What you are proposing, that the Builders might still be here and still be active, is another matter. This star system suggests to me that some other group—the ones I called the Voiders—came along after the Builders and did their own dirty work.”

“But that doesn’t mean the Builders must be gone completely. Maybe they are still around in other parts of this arm.”

“They might be. I’m quite willing to admit the possibility of two races of super-beings. But you know how Julian Graves reacted. He talked about the ‘undesirability of concatenating implausibilities.’ As if we were not sure of the existence of the Builders themselves, when we have seen evidence of their existence all over our own spiral arm. I’m hoping that what we find on Iceworld will persuade Julian Graves to change his mind.”

“My idea wasn’t new, was it? You had the same thought yourself, long ago.”

“Possibly something very like it. But keep thinking. It could be that the Builders became extinct when they stopped thinking.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“No, I don’t. On the other hand, I’ve been wrong about the Builders so many times in the past, you shouldn’t accept my views—or anyone else’s—as gospel.” Darya saw that Rebka and Blesh were examining something in the autochef, and Ben Blesh was laughing. She concluded, “If you have more ideas when we reach Iceworld, I’d like to discuss them.”

It was intended to be an easy way to end the talk and hurry over to protect her own stomach, but it produced a surprising response. Lara lowered her voice and said, “There is something else I’d like to talk you about. But not right now. I want to speak privately.”

It didn’t sound as though Lara wanted another conversation about the Builders. That was a pity. Darya herself would be more than ready for that, especially after they’d had a chance to examine Iceworld.

Maybe Hans was right after all. Maybe “obsession” was the best word for it.

* * *

They had traveled to an alien arm of the galaxy where humans had never been before. They were within an alien star system, and only a day ago they had left a dead and alien world. But alien was relative. There were degrees of alienation. The planet they had come from, with its air and oceans and mountains and what had once been a thriving civilization of intelligent beings, felt like home compared with Iceworld.

Darya sat by Hans Rebka’s side and alternated her attention between the displays of the ship’s sensors and the planet around which the Savior now orbited. She had to think of it as alternating attention, because they could not see the world in any conventional sense. To human eyes, Iceworld was no more than darkness visible, a black disk revealed by the absence of the stars that it occulted.

Every other imaging sensor, at every frequency from hard X-rays to long-wavelength radio, told the same story. They detected no emitted signal. The planet was simply not there. Only one seldom-used instrument, a low-resolution imaging device normally used to measure cosmic background radiation, admitted a presence. It reported a unique world where the maximum temperature was little more than one kelvin, and that only in isolated places. In many places the temperature was too small to register—which meant that it had to be less than one hundredth of a degree absolute.