Hans Rebka might have guessed it at once: Julian Graves needed to be alone, for some compelling reason of his own. But Hans was not there to observe Graves, or to warn Darya of something else. He had observed her over the past year, and he would have agreed with her: there had been big changes in Darya Lang. But those changes were incomplete. Darya was too self-confident. Now she knew just enough to be dangerous to herself and to everyone around her.
Rebka would have offered a different corollary to her Great Truth: Don’t waste time solving the wrong problems.
Darya Lang was intellectually very smart, up at genius level. But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data. That was where Darya’s troubles began. In Hans’s terms, when she lacked the right data she still did not know how to acquire it.
That was not her fault. Most of Darya’s life had been spent evaluating information collected by other people, of far-off events, times, and places. Data were printouts and articles and tables and images. Success was defined by an ability to digest a huge amount of information from all sources, and then devise a way to impose order and logic on it. Progress was often slow. The path to success might be decades long. No matter. Speed was not an issue. Persistence was far more important.
Hans Rebka was a graduate of a different school of life. Data were events, usually happening in real time and seldom written out for inspection. They could be anything from an odd instrument reading, to a sudden change in the wind, to a scowl that became a smile on a person’s face. Success was measured by survival. The road to success might remain open only for a fraction of a second.
Rebka had noticed the anomaly when Julian Graves first announced who would go down in the seedship to look for Genizee, and who would remain on the Erebus: Graves would not go, although it was Graves who had felt most strongly the need to seek out the Zardalu — Graves who had resigned from the Council, Graves who had organized the expedition, Graves who had bought the ship. And then, with Genizee identified and the Zardalu hidden only by the shroud of singularities, Julian Graves had suddenly declined to pursue them. “I must stay here.”
Now Graves had again refused to leave the Erebus. Unfortunately, Hans Rebka had not been around to warn Darya Lang that his second refusal must be regarded as far more significant.
To penetrate the nested singularities for the first time had been an episode of tension, of cautious probing, of calculated risk. For the Indulgence, following the path of the seedship less than two days later, the journey was routine. The information returned with the drone had provided a description of branch points and local space-time anomalies in such detail that Dulcimer took one look at the list, sniffed, and set the Indulgence to autopilot.
“It’s an insult to my profession,” he said to E.C. Tally. The Chism Polypheme was lounging in his pilot’s chair, a lopsided device arranged so that his spiral tail fitted into it and all his arms had access to the control panel. He was cool again, his skin returned to its dark cucumber green, but as the heat faded from him he became increasingly irritable and haughty. “It’s a slur on my Chismhood.”
Tally nodded, but did not understand. “Why is it an insult and a slur?”
“Because I’m a Polypheme! I need challenges, perils, problems worthy of my talents. There is nothing to this piloting job, no difficult decisions to make, no close calls — a Ditron could do it.”
Tally nodded again. What Dulcimer seemed to be saying was that a Chism Polypheme found work unsatisfying unless there was substantial risk attached to it. It was an illogical attitude, but who was to say that Polyphemes were logical? There was no information about them in Tally’s data bank.
“You mean you thrive on difficulty — on danger?”
“You better believe it!” Dulcimer leaned back and expanded his body, stretching to full length. “We Polyphemes — specially me — are the bravest, most fearless beings in the Galaxy. Show us danger, we eat it up.”
“Indeed.” Tally took a microsecond to mull over that odd statement. “You have often experienced danger?”
“Me? Danger?” Dulcimer swiveled his chair to face Tally. An embodied computer was not much of an audience, but there was nothing else available. “Let me tell you about the time that I beat the Rumbleside scad merchants at their own game, and came this close” — he held up his top two hands, a fraction of an inch apart — “to being killed along the way. Me and the scad merchants had been having a little disagreement, see, about a radiation shipment I made that shrunk on the way — nothing to do with me, as I explained to them. They said not to worry, things like that can happen to anyone, and anyway they had another job for me. I was to go to Polytope, fill my cargo hold with local ice, and bring it back to Rumbleside. Water-ice? I said. That’s right, they said. There’s a lot of water-ice on Polytope? I said. There sure is, they said, any amount. But we want just Polytope water, ice, no other. And we want big penalties if you don’t deliver on time.
“I should have known something was a bit funny when I read the agreement, because the penalties for nondelivery included my arms and my scanning eye. But I’ve shipped water-ice a thousand times, with never a problem. So we shook tongues on it like civilized beings, and I headed the Indulgence for Polytope.
“Only thing is, they hadn’t mentioned to me that Polytope is a world that the Tristan free-space Manticore dreamed on one of its off days. On Polytope, you see, water decreases in volume as it turns to ice instead of expanding as it does everywhere else. And it was a cold world, too, below freezing point most of the year. So the oceans never froze over, but when the water at the top got cold enough to turn to ice, that ice just sank down to the bottom and stayed there.
“There was certainly plenty of water-ice on Polytope, and a shipment of it would sure be valuable — but it was all down under five kilometers of water. I checked the land surface. Polytope had plenty of that, too, but no water-ice on it. I needed a submersible. But the nearest world where I could rent one big enough was so far away, I’d have blown my contract deadline before I could get there and back. What to do, Mr. Tally. What to do?”
“Well,” — Tally’s pause for thought was imperceptible in human terms — “If I were placed in such a position—”
“I know you have no idea, sir, so I’ll tell you. There was a mining world less than a day’s jump away. I flew there, rented land-mining equipment, flew back, and put the Indulgence down by the side of the ocean. I dug a slanting tunnel, thirty kilometers long — very scary, I was worried all the way about the roof collapsing on me — down under the ocean bed. And then I dug upward until I reached the water-ice sitting on the seabed. I mined it from the bottom, you see, then pulled it along the tunnel to my ship. I took off, and got back to Rumbleside with the shipment and with two minutes to spare before my deadline. You should have seen the disappointed faces of those scad merchants when I arrived! They were already sharpening their knives for me.” Dulcimer leaned back expansively in his chair. “Now, tell me true, sir, did you ever have an experience to match that?”
E.C. Tally considered experiences and matching algorithms. “Not exactly equivalent. But perhaps comparable. Involving the Zardalu.”
“Zardalu! You met Zardalu, did you? Oh yes.” Dulcimer put on the facial expression that to a thousand worlds in the spiral arm indicated a Chism Polypheme at its most sneering and insulting. To E.C. Tally it suggested that Dulcimer was suffering badly from stomach gas.
“Zardalu. Well, Mr. Tally.” The Polypheme inclined to indulgence, as the name of his ship pointed out. He nodded. “Since we’ve nothing better to do, sir, I suppose you may as well tell me about it. Go ahead.”