The Spheres of Heaven

He looked for a place to pour the measure of water that he was holding, and after a moment tilted it up and drank it.

“All that’s left to do,” he went on, “is pour some of the water we collected from outside, and fill the measurer to the same level.” Bony did that carefully, his eye on the marks on the side of the measuring cylinder. “And now, you see, because the balance is weighed down to the same place as it was with the water we brought with us, we know that …” His voice faded away.

“But it isn’t at the same place on the balance,” Liddy said. She gazed at him with dark, wide-open eyes. “It’s pulled down quite a bit farther. That means it weighs more, doesn’t it?”

“It weighs more.” Bony was staring in disbelief at the balance. “Nearly fifteen percent more. It’s a lot denser than water. And that means …” Bony went across to an access cover for the main drive and flopped down onto it. So much for his big show-off demonstration, the one that was supposed to impress Liddy Morse.

“Means what?” asked Liddy.

“It means it’s not water. I don’t know what the hell that stuff is out there.” Bony waved his hand toward the expanse of silent green beyond the port. “But I know what it isn’t. And it isn’t water.”

4: GENERAL KORIN

The office suite of Dougal MacDougal was appropriate in size and splendor for someone with the exalted title of Solar High Ambassador to the Stellar Group. Lying within a huge and perfect dodecahedron, two hundred meters on a side, the suite sat deep beneath the surface of Ceres. In an architect’s conceit, the other four Platonic regular solids were nested within it at a considerable loss in useful living space. A crystal tetrahedron formed the very center. By an ornate desk in that tetrahedron sat Chan Dalton. Awaiting MacDougal’s return, he had been drinking steadily and popping fizz slugs. Now he felt wasted and was asking himself why he had done it.

The prospect of danger in the Geyser Swirl was not the problem. Danger was nothing new. Anyone who reached a position of power in the Gallimaufries faced danger every day. Chan had received — and given — his share of sudden and violent attacks. His facial scars spoke more of blood and guts than thrown floral bouquets.

Treachery was not the problem, either. You expected to be stabbed in the back, figuratively and literally, by everyone who wanted to get close to the Duke of Bosny. That was fair enough. Hadn’t you done the same thing yourself?

Lies were not the problem. Of course you were lied to; you expected it and you discounted what you were told, no matter the source. Even when people were not trying to lie, their output was usually wrong because some rat-head had given it to them wrong. Over the years you had met a few men and women you could rely on, but no more than you could count on the fingers of one hand. Trying to reach them over the past few days, you learned — not surprisingly — that they were scattered all over. Quality was like a thin veneer on the unfinished rough-cut of the extended solar system.

Even uncertainty was not the problem. You didn’t know where you would land when you passed through the Link Network to the Geyser Swirl, or what you would find there. But what else was new? The only certainties in life were unpleasant ones. Tomorrow was uncertain unless you were sentenced to die tonight. And even that was uncertain. You might be reprieved. You might escape. There might be a war or an earthquake.

Chan helped himself to one more fizz slug.

No. The problem today was not danger, treachery, lies, or uncertainty. Perhaps it was impossibility . The impossibility of things going so wrong, and the questions that raised.

Consider the evidence. Give them half a chance, and humans were likely to do stupid, rash things just for the hell of it, or to save themselves from dying of boredom. No other Stellar Group member was like that. The Tinkers, the Pipe-Rillas, and the Angels — especiallythe Angels — did not take risks. And they applied their safety-first approach to the Link Network. The system itself would not permit the violation of its three Golden Rules:

1. Close is not good enough . Travellers who missed the long, coded sequence of Link settings by a single digit might arrive as thin pink pancakes, or as long, braided ribbons of mangled flesh. Therefore, the settings must pass a multiply redundant checklist, so detailed and foolproof that every black hole in the universe would radiate itself away long before an incorrect sequence would be activated.

2. Know your exit point . Careless travellers who needed to breathe could arrive suitless in hard vacuum. An organism for whom high gravity was instantly fatal might land on the surface of Earth. To prevent those things, the Link checking system was supposed to match traveller life-support needs to destination and refuse to allow inappropriate transfer.

3. Two into one won’t go . A Link arrival point had to be empty before a Link would be initiated. That lesson, too, humans had learned the hard way. A small high-temperature cloud of plasma in orbit near Jupiter marked the simultaneous arrival of two ships at a Sargasso Dump Link exit point.

The Stellar Group applied the safety rules scrupulously. They would have examined the Geyser Swirl Link point closely before sending their first exploration team. And before sending a second team? Chan couldn’t begin to imagine the checking and the rechecking and the triple-checking that must have been done. Undoubtedly, their ships would also have been set up to return through the Network at the first sign of difficulty.

But even with all this, nothing had come back. Chan could imagine being more wily, cunning, and brave than a Stellar Group team. Hell, he wouldn’t be here if that weren’t true. What he couldn’t imagine was being more careful . And that was a very bad omen.

The outer door of the office was sliding open. At last. Chan glanced at the clock built into the ornate surface of MacDougal’s desk. As he suspected, the Ambassador had taken far too long. More problems.

“You couldn’t get it?”

“Oh, I got it all right.” MacDougal had a sour look on his face as he went to his desk. That was all right. Chan was in a foul mood, too. “The answer is not reassuring. It seems that we were provided with false information.”

“Happens all the time. Our ship didn’t go to the Geyser Swirl?”

“It went there all right. But I am no longer surprised that it failed to return. You see, this was very much a secret and undercover operation. We had to take many things on trust that would normally be checked through official channels. The `highly competent and experienced private team’ that I told you about? It doesn’t look so good now. The crew captain, Friday Indigo, is a rich man, but it is all inherited wealth. He describes himself as an `entrepreneur,’ but he has never earned a penny in his life. And he is a `space expert’ who failed his space navigation examination three times and his engineering tests four times. Most upsetting.”

“Not to me. It’s more worrying when competent people don’t come back.” Chan studied the scowling image that MacDougal threw up on the display set into the surface of the desk. “That’s Friday Indigo? He looks like he’s got a pickle up his ass. What about the other crew members?”

“Two of them. The chief engineer and astrogator is a total mystery. We have been able to discover nothing at all about him. There is no name in the files, and we have no background. Not even a picture! He is described vaguely as a `big, fat man.’ Certainly he does not have official certification in either engineering or astrogation. But there is another mystery here. When we checked with Venus Equilateral, the Mood Indigo’s last stop before it departed for the Geyser Swirl, their senior engineering staff insisted that the ship carried an engineer who knew what he was doing.”

“Self-taught, maybe. I am, pretty much.”

“You are not claiming credentials that you do not have.” MacDougal drummed his fingers nervously on the top of the desk. “Are you?”

“I’m not claiming anything. But if I thought I could get more out of this deal by lying about my credentials, I’d do it before you could spit. What about the third crew member, what do you know about him?”

“Not him. Her. The third crew member is a female, Liddy Morse. I am hoping you can help us.”