The Spheres of Heaven

claimed technical competence. The Angel said,  “ ‘Full fathom five, thy Finder lies,’ ” which didn’t seem to help at all.

Vow-of-Silence said, “Very good. Eager Seeker, I’m sorry to trouble you. If you wouldn’t mind?”

Eager Seeker offered no reply, but the whole heap of the Tinker Composite disassembled, rose, and circled briefly like an underwater tornado. Then the components streaked away in all directions.

Bony said, “What?” but Liddy’s nudge saved him from making a bigger fool of himself. After a couple of minutes the Angel added, “ ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ ” Five minutes later the Tinker components came streaming back. They merged to make a tall column, held there for maybe ten seconds, then reformed to create a horizontal line that snaked away into the murk.

“Thank you, Eager Seeker.” Vow-of-Silence gestured to Bony and Liddy with one of her fore-limbs. “After you.”

“How could the Tinker understand that?” Liddy asked Bony, as they followed the strung-out line of components. “I thought they had no intelligence unless they were formed into a Composite.”

She spoke softly, but Vow-of-Silence heard her. “Indeed they do not.” The Pipe-Rilla with her Angel burden was close behind. As she moved to Bony’s side, the individual components in the line of Tinkers behind her coalesced into a rough sphere.

“My reply was formal politeness,” Vow-of-Silence went on, “and no more than that. I will repeat our expression of gratitude when we reach the ship, and Eager Seeker is once more fully assembled into a higher consciousness.”

The Angel said nothing. The blue-green fronds were furled about the upper body, and to Bony’s eye the resemblance to a large vegetable became complete.

The little party trudged on across the seafloor as twilight edged toward night. Flickers of lightning, faint and far-off, picked out the guiding column of Tinkers. It seemed far more than three kilometers when the rococo outline of the toppled Finder at last appeared.

Bony was too tired to do more than struggle aboard, remove his suit, and find a place to lie down on a cluttered floor that was actually a wall. After a few seconds Liddy came to curl up beside him. She snuggled close but said not a word. Bony was left to reflect that this was an adolescent’s dream. He was spending the night with a woman who had been trained in the Leah Rainbow Academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk, a woman who had been trained to please men in a hundred different ways. A woman, moreover, who seemed to like him and had told him that he was attractive.

Bony sighed. If Liddy knew a hundred ways to delight, Life knew a thousand ways to disappoint. Nothing was going to happen tonight.

He put a protective arm over her. In the few moments before he went to sleep he decided that human judgment was wrong. Pipe-Rillas were brave, not cowardly. Tinkers were not unstable, but steady and reliable. Only the Angels appeared to match their reputation. His final memory was of a synthesizer voice, grumbling from a dark corner: “Standing without the touch of soil, bare-rooted and bereft of light. `How are the mighty fallen!’ ”

* * *

Hunger woke Bony. He lay in darkness and could not recall when he had last eaten. His stomach was growling like a wild beast.

He reached out and found Liddy gone. He opened his eyes, and the Angel’s corner stood empty. Over to his right, the port showed the first faintest glint of dawn. Off to his left, toward the ship’s bow, he saw a brighter light and heard the sound of voices.

He rubbed tired eyes, stood up, and headed to the adjoining chamber. They were all there. The Angel stood directly beneath a glowing tube, its lower part in a container filled with dark liquid. Eager Seeker had assembled its components into a fat ring around the Angel’s bulky middle section. As Bony came in, Liddy — wonderful mind- reader Liddy — handed him a white half-moon with a crumbly texture and said, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not bad and it’s supposed to be suited to a human digestion.”

Bony took a big bite, nodded his thanks, and joined the others in staring at the Pipe-Rilla. Vow-of-Silence was crouched by the main control desk of the Finder , and she was shaking her narrow head. “We have a status report on the condition of this ship, which is not good. We also have other surprising news. I have called for an oral summary.” Vow-of-Silence bowed to Bony and Liddy. “Recognizing your limitations, it will be provided in your form of speech.”

In spite of the polite gesture the final comment was, at the very least, a dig at humans. Pipe-Rillas and Tinker Composites had no difficulty picking up in a few weeks everything from Swahili to Sioux, while less than a hundred human interpreters had mastered the alien languages. As for the native tongue of the tongueless Angels, even the Tinkers and Pipe-Rillas said it was next to impossible.

Even so, Bony wondered if this was going to work. The onboard computer of the Finder was probably as good as the Pipe-Rillas could make, but in this area of technology nothing in the Stellar Group came close to human products. Sure enough, the voice that came from the cabin address system had a labored, mechanical quality, with odd breaks between words.

THERE HAS BEEN A CONTINUED STEADY DETERIORATION IN THIS SHIP’S ENERGY SUPPLY AND STORAGE SYSTEMS. ONE STORAGE ELEMENT SUFFERED MAJOR DAMAGE UPON EMERGING FROM THE LINK INTO WATER, AND IT CANNOT BE USED. THE MINOR HULL FRACTURE EXPERIENCED AT THAT SAME TIME HAS BEEN COMPENSATED THROUGH THE USE OF A SEPARATING FIELD, BUT SUCH A FIELD REQUIRES A SUBSTANTIAL AND CONTINUOUS EXPENDITURE OF ENERGY. THAT ENERGY CANNOT BE REPLACED, NOR CAN REPAIRS BE MADE, UNTIL THE SHIP IS NO LONGER IMMERSED IN A DENSE SURROUNDING MEDIUM. TRANSFER OF THE SHIP TO ITS DESIGNED VACUUM ENVIRONMENT MUST OCCUR WITHIN THREE DAYS, OTHERWISE PRESENT LEVELS OF LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEMS CANNOT BE MAINTAINED.

Bony wondered if “vacuum” really meant vacuum. Would it do to raise the Finder to the surface, or beach it? That sort of thing would not be easy, but it was an area suited to his own fix-up skills. Given a day or two and some cooperation he could certainly have raised the Mood Indigo using the auxiliary thrustors, and probably taken it to space. The Finder was much more of an unknown quantity, but he was willing to give it a shot if they would let him.

The computer was not finished. THE ELECTROMAGNETIC COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM HAS NOT FUNCTIONED CORRECTLY SINCE IMMERSION. THE NEUTRINO COMMUNICATION SYSTEM WAS RESTORED TO SERVICE ELEVEN HOURS AGO, IN SO FAR AS SUCH A RESTORATION IS POSSIBLE WITHOUT A MAJOR OVERHAUL. CONTACT HAS BEEN MADE WITH TWO VESSELS: FIRST, THE MINISTER OF GRACE , WITH A CREW OF ANGELS AND OF SELLORAN REGISTRATION. HOWEVER, THIS CONTACT WAS LOST NINE HOURS AGO AND HAS NOT BEEN REGAINED.

The Angel said gloomily, “The Minister of Grace , swept into the abyss by the force of the storm. `Thou art lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry.’ ”

The computer ignored the Angel and went on, SECOND, THE HERO’S RETURN , WITH A CREW OF HUMANS AND WITH SOL REGISTRATION, REPORTS THAT IT IS NEWLY ARRIVED IN THIS VICINITY AND LIES ON THE SEABED ROUGHLY THREE KILOMETERS FROM OUR POSITION. WE CONTINUE TO EXCHANGE LOCATION AND IDENTIFICATION SIGNALS WITH THE COMPUTER OF THE HERO’S RETURN.

Bony decided that the Finder’s onboard computer was not just primitive, it was very dumb. He had never heard of a ship named the Hero’s Return , but it sounded just like the sort of thing you would call a Class Five cruiser. Any decent computer ought to have that kind of information in its data banks — and it should be able to rank information in probable order of importance. This news should have set off every alarm bell in the ship, announcing that the new vessel had appeared. The computer on the Hero’s Return , along with its crew, must be going crazy wondering why they had heard nothing in return but a bland I/D signal.

If no one else knew what to do, it was up to him. Bony — with the cursed stammer that came always at the wrong time — blurted out, “Ask the Hero’s Return to s-send us a p- picture. And ask for information on ship type.”