“Not all of us.” Ben spoke softly. “Lara isn’t here. That was my fault.”
“No.” Darya turned to him. “It was my fault. I was the one who insisted on going to Iceworld.”
Rebka said, “It was Lara’s own fault—she deliberately disobeyed Ben’s order. Anyway, we’ve already been over that ten times. We have to focus on today. How did it happen that we all arrived here, like magic?”
“Just like magic.” Nenda snorted. “Let me tell you somethin’. When I was younger and even dumber than I am now, I wasted lots of time in the Eyecatch Gallery on Scordato. I studied the gamblin’ games, an’ finally I found one I liked. I watched it played, figured I couldn’t lose. Twenty buttons, and twenty different colors that could come up on a screen. The color for any button changed randomly with each play. You paid for ten tries. If on any try you pressed your button and the screen came up yellow, you were sunk—out of the game. Otherwise you kept goin’. Make it all the way, an’ you won double your original stake. I worked out the odds. You had nineteen chances out of twenty that you’d make it through any one try, so you had nearly a six out of ten chance—Tally will confirm this—of makin’ it through all ten. That was better than evens of winnin’. So I paid my stake, an’ I played. I hit green and purple and orange and black, all the way through to my tenth play. Then I pushed a button one last time, an’ the screen came up yellow. What I hadn’t known was that the game was rigged. If you made it as far as the tenth play, you got yellow no matter what button you pushed.”
The others stared at Nenda as though he had switched to some alien language, until Hans Rebka said, “Like the system we found ourselves in when we reached the Sag Arm. It was rigged. No matter what route you took from the Pride of Orion, or what method you tried, the screen finally came up yellow—you were shipped here.”
Nenda added, “All roads lead to Marglot. I bet there’s a thousand more buttons in that system that nobody tried. Me an’ At, we did it the hard way. Off through the Bose Network to Pleasureworld, then all the way to Pompadour. But we didn’t need to. We could have closed our eyes, pushed any button, and finished up in a transport vortex that would bring us here.”
“Here,” Darya Lang said, “where the animals are already dead. Here, where all other life on the planet is going to die. If Tally and Atvar H’sial are correct, here is a place where everything is doomed, even the sun itself. Why bring us here, just so we can die?” She turned to Nenda. “You say you and Atvar H’sial are the stupid ones, but you came here in a ship. And the reason you have that ship is because you didn’t arrive using a transport vortex. If it weren’t for you, we would have no way to escape.”
“Minor correction. It’s a pinnace, not a ship. An’ with all you lot"—Nenda counted—"we’d never cram you in. Even if we piled you three deep, we wouldn’t get off the ground. Either it’s half a dozen trips to orbit, which would really be pushing the pinnace, or else the Have-It-All has to come down. Which I hate like hell to do, because that’s my last card.”
“But if E.C. Tally is right, we will be forced to seek such an escape. And yet—and yet—” Julian Graves sat with his hand hooding his eyes. “Logic is not my strong point, but I am confused. The Builders brought us here. I accept that. I can even accept that they were not aware of our mortal weakness, and expected that we would find a way to survive. But why not bring us here directly? Why have us travel first to a dead system?”
Darya said, “So we could see it. Would you ever have believed that a stellar system could die like that, if you hadn’t been there and seen it for yourself? I wouldn’t. The Builders wanted us to know that a whole system could die, before we were brought to one that is dying.”
“But if the Builders destroyed the other system—” Teri Dahl began.
“They didn’t. It was the others—the Destroyers—who did it.”
“The Destroyers, the Voiders,” Torran Veck said. “Sure. If everything doesn’t work out with one race of super-beings, invent another. Professor Lang, if you can’t make sense—”
“Save the bickering for later.” Julian Graves cut him off. “I make no claims as to my performance, which has so far been pathetic; but I am still the leader of this expedition. It is my conclusion that Professor Lang is right. We were brought to the Sag Arm for a purpose. That purpose is to see what has happened, to understand what can happen, and to take that knowledge back with us to the Orion Arm. Whatever causes this, we must find a way to stop it—not only for the sake of beings in this arm, for our own home clades.” He turned to Nenda. “I am assuming that the Have-It-All is still somewhere in orbit?”
“Sure it is. One yell from me and J’merlia can bring it here. But I won’t do that ’til we have to, because the Have-It-All is my only ticket home.”
“That is a policy both wise and practical. Also, we should learn as much as possible before we leave Marglot. However, for my own peace of mind I would like you to do one thing. Please contact your crew on the Have-It-All and confirm that they are in a position to land here on Marglot, if necessary at short notice.”
“I’ll do it—though I’ll tell you right now, the idea of this lot clutterin’ up the inside of my ship don’t exactly thrill me. I’ll call from the pinnace. It has better transmission equipment than the suits, an’ there are channels that Kallik will be sure to have open. Take me a few minutes.”
He moved to the multiple overlapping leaf layers that formed the wall of the cone-house. As he pulled the inner layer aside, Hans Rebka was somehow standing next to him.
Nenda paused with his hand on the side of the leaf. He said, softly enough so that Rebka alone could hear, “I don’t remember anybody invitin’ you.”
“I invited myself.” Rebka motioned Nenda to continue beyond the inner layer. When they were standing in the narrow space between the leaves, he went on, “Look, I know what I think of you, and I can guess that you don’t think any better of me. But we are both realists. Like it or not, Julian Graves is in charge of this expedition and the others will do what he says.”
“Yeah. Old numb-nuts, the Ethical Councilor. He never met an alien he didn’t like, even when it was tryin’ to kill him.”
“I don’t think anyone but you and me realizes how much danger we could be in—maybe Atvar H’sial, because the two of you seem to be on the same wavelength. Anyway, I’ve got an itch inside that I can’t scratch, and it feels like trouble.”
“Yeah. But we don’t know when an’ how.” Nenda whistled through his teeth. “All right. I hate to say this, but I’ll go along. We work together, ’til we’re out of this crappy place an’ home in the Orion Arm. Then it’s back to business as usual.”
“Some business there I can do without. I was twelve hours away from execution when an inter-clade councilor arrived to take me to Miranda. Now I feel like I’m waiting to be executed on Marglot.” Rebka pushed his way through the remaining leaves until he was outside the cone-house. There he paused until Louis Nenda joined him. Rebka went on, “Seems like our worries are justified. What do you make of this?”
The two men stared at the ground, then looked up to the clouded sky. Here at the Hot Pole, perpetually warmed by the hot gas-giant around which Marglot orbited, an impossible event was taking place.