Resurgence

Hans leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. His position was not comfortable, but comfort was a relative term. If he could manage to sleep shackled naked to an iron chair, he could certainly relax now. He was passing into a trance not far removed from sleep when he heard a mumble from next to him.

“Do you know what you are? A screwup, a total hopeless screwup.”

Was Ben Blesh talking to Hans? But then he went on, “You say you’re a survival specialist. You told Arabella Lund that it’s what you’d always wanted to be, what you dreamed of doing. But look at you. You didn’t help anyone to survive. You couldn’t even save yourself. Other people had to do that for you. What are you going to do now? Some big deed of heroism, something that will save everybody? You think you’d die to achieve that, but I doubt that you’ll have the chance. You’re a screwup, a burden on others. You’ll drag them down, unless you take the decent way out and kill yourself so they don’t have to look after you.”

Hans could not help listening, but what he heard did not worry him. A combination of shock, injury, and medications was at work on Ben Blesh, allowing deep-seated thoughts of inadequacy and self-doubt to emerge. Ideas like that normally lay in the mind’s lowest levels, hidden away from the rest of the world. Hans didn’t think any the worse of Ben because of them. He wondered what would emerge from his own mouth in similar circumstances. Nothing to be proud of, you could be sure of that—but nothing to be ashamed of, either, if he did as well as Ben. The other man wanted to be useful, to save others, to die himself if he had to.

As Hans drifted away again toward sleep, he reached a decision. When they emerged—if they emerged—from the interior of Iceworld, he would treat Ben Blesh with a lot more respect. It was the old story. You could train a man or woman as much as you liked in the peace and quiet of a training camp, but character developed and showed itself only in the rough-and-tumble messiness of the real world.

In situations, in fact, just like this one. Ben Blesh was discovering, the hard way but the only way, his own strength of character.

* * *

“Hans, Hans—they’re here!”

Darya’s urgent tone jerked him out of his dream state. He sat upright, stared around, and saw nothing. The room was as empty now as when they arrived.

“What’s coming? Who’s coming?”

“I don’t know. But Hans, look at the floor.”

He glanced down. Beyond his outstretched legs the floor of the room was dusted with sparks of orange light. They intensified as he watched. He touched Ben’s left arm—the good one. Ben said, “It’s all right. I’m all right. I’m awake.”

Darya backed up toward the wall. Hans could see the sparks intensifying at the center of the room, forming a brighter disk of orange. Darya moved to his side and they waited, huddling closer together as the orange circle brightened. And then, just as slowly, it began to fade.

Hans took his first deep breath for ages. “False alarm. Darya, you are the Builder expert. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

She silenced him with a wave of her hand. “No false alarm. Something is coming. Look.”

The center of the sparkling circle was changing. At its middle a dot of silver had appeared. While they watched that dot grew in size, bulging through the floor and slowly rising. The rounded bulge lifted farther to become a hemisphere, paused, then rose again until it was a wobbling sphere of quicksilver supported on a slender silver tail. At the upper end a narrow neck formed, bearing a pentagonal silver tip. The five-sided head turned, questing.

“What is it?” Ben sounded nervous, like the youth that he was. “Is that a Builder?”

“It’s not a Builder. But the Builders made it.” Darya raised her hand toward the trembling sphere. “Can you understand us? Oh, Hans, of course it can’t. We’re in the Sag Arm. No Builder construct here will ever have heard human speech, even if all the languages in the galaxy are somewhere in its data base.”

Ben said, “So what happens now? Do we sit here until it gets tired and goes away again?”

“No. We train it. It will learn our speech, but it needs a sample to analyze. We have to keep talking, to it or to each other. It shouldn’t matter which.”

The silver sphere was beginning to make sounds of its own. A steady hissing was interrupted now and again by a high-pitched whistle and deep rumbles like a volcano ready to erupt.

“Talk about what?” Ben asked. Hans could relate to that question. His own mind had become a total blank.