Transvergence by Charles Sheffield Page B

intelligences on board the Erebus .

    The little Hymenopt came drifting in, to stand diffidently by Darya's side. Darya raised her eyebrows.

    "One has heard," began Kallik. She had learned to interpret human gestures, far better than Darya had learned to read hers. "One has heard that you have been able to perform a systematic mapping of Anfract geometry."

    Darya nodded. "How do you know that?"

    "Master Nenda said that you spoke of it to him."

    "Pearls before swine."

    "Indeed?" Kallik bobbed her black head politely. "But the statement is true, is it not? Because if so, a discovery of my own may have relevance." She settled down on the floor next to Darya, eight legs splayed.

    Darya stopped glooming. The unscratched itch in her brain started to fade, and she began to pay serious attention to Kallik. It was the Hymenopt, after all, who had—quite independently of Darya—solved the riddle of artifact spheres of change which had led them to Quake at Summertide.

    "I, too, have been studying the Anfract," Kallik went on. "Perhaps from a different perspective than yours. I decided that, although the geometric structure of the Anfract itself is interesting, our focus should be on planets within it. They, surely, are the only places where Zardalu could reasonably be living. It might seem well established from outside observation that there are many, many planets within the Anfract—the famous phenomenon known as the Beads, or String of Pearls, would seem to prove it: scores of beautiful planets, observed by scores of ships. Proved, except for this curious fact: the explorers who succeed in reaching the interior of the Anfract, and returning from it, report no planets around the handful of suns that they visited. They say that planets in the Anfract must certainly be a rarity, and perhaps even nonexistent. Who, then, is right?"

    "The ones who went inside." Darya did not hesitate. "Remote viewing is no substitute for direct approach."

    "My conclusion also. So the Beads, and the String of Pearls, must be illusions. They are the result of an odd lens effect that focuses planets from far away, perhaps outside the spiral arm or in another galaxy entirely, and makes them visible in the neighborhood of the Anfract. Very well. I therefore eliminated all the multiple planetary sightings of the Beads, and of String of Pearls. That left only a handful of isolated planet sightings within the Anfract. If our earlier analyses are correct, one of them will be Genizee. I have locations from which they were viewed, and their directions at the time. But I did not know how to propagate through the Anfract's complex geometry to the interior—"

    "I do!" Darya was cursing herself. She had worked alone because she usually worked alone, but it was clear now that she should have been collaborating with Kallik. "I needed to do those calculations so I could derive lightlike trajectories across the Anfract."

    "As I surmised and hoped." Kallik moved to the terminal that tied the observation bubble to the central computer of the Erebus . "So if I provide you with my locations and directions, and you continue their vectors along Anfract geodesics—"

    "—we'll have your planet locations." The mental itch was almost gone. Darya felt a vague sense of loss, but action overrode it. "Give me a few minutes, and I'll crank out all your answers."

     

    Darya was tempted to call it a law of nature.

    Lang's Law: Everything always takes longer.

    It was not a few minutes. It was six hours before she could collate her results and seek out Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda. She found them with Julian Graves in the main control room of the Erebus . Dulcimer was nowhere to be seen, but the three-dimensional displays of the Anfract, ported over from the Polypheme's data banks on the Indulgence , filled the center of the room.

    She stood in silence for a few seconds, savoring the moment and waiting to be noticed. Then she realized that might take a long time. They were