Venturi Read online

  Alex headed down, relaxing in the tranquil surroundings. Silvie didn’t use holographic scenery, since quarians found it unconvincing. Instead, she had programmed the VR surround in the tubes to generate abstract shapes in pleasing, slowly shifting ocean colours.

  At the bottom of the shaft, though, things changed dramatically. Here was where Silvie’s garden started, the reef running all along the lower part of the extended U shape of the transit tubes.

  It was a real, living reef and there were real fish swimming around it, too. Inga and her team were actually responsible for monitoring the aquadeck and doing the immense amount of paperwork involved in keeping a live reef-tank aboard a starship, though it was Silvie herself who looked after it.

  ‘Hey Ulric.’ Alex greeted the aquadeck’s biggest and friendliest resident, a twenty-centimetre groupo which followed Silvie around like a puppy, but was happy to come and see anyone if Silvie wasn’t around. ‘How are you doing?’ Alex asked, giving the fish a tickle under the jaw. The Diplomatic Corps had still not quite got over the embarrassment of Silvie finding out that there was a secret research facility at Chartsey where they had been cultivating samples of quarian flora and fauna sneaked off Quarus by the League’s ambassadors. Silvie hadn’t made a big deal of it, but she had helped herself to everything she wanted from their collection, including Ulric. He had, Alex felt, a mournful kind of face, with his huge downturned mouth and sad goggle eyes. But Silvie said he was a very happy fish, really.

  Ulric didn’t answer, of course – he was a fish – but he responded to the friendly tone and the tickle with a contented squirm, pushing himself against Alex’s hand and then swimming alongside him as Alex moved off through a side-tube. This took him through to the lower, water-filled level of the aquadeck. This was kelp-garden, though that went nowhere near conveying the riotous colours of it all. Many of the kelp species here were luminous, lovely at night but so garish in daylight they always looked, Alex thought, artificial. In fact, the whole effect was very much as if a bunch of kids had gone nuts in here with a load of neon paints. A shoal of rainbow-spotted fish drifted around, trailing their shimmering wedding-veil tails.

  Alex left them to it, swimming up through one of the pool openings above and climbing out into the air-level garden. The colours were just as garish here, but the atmosphere was wonderfully tranquil. Quarian artworks, pretty much incomprehensible to humans, were dotted around, with the only sound that of the various water features. You couldn’t even hear the engines here and with the holoscreen deactivated Silvie really had been tucked away in a little world of her own, oblivious to the drama.

  She wasn’t there then, though, and when Alex touched his wristcom to tell her that he was on the aquadeck if she fancied joining him there for a cuppa, she answered blithely that she was busy. She was, she said, helping with the bio-sampling survey.

  So Alex ambled into the bathroom for a few minutes of pampering before returning to the high-paced demands on the command deck. It was good, he knew, to take a little break, so he didn’t need to feel guilty about it.

  The quarian bathroom, as always, compelled relaxation. It was a big space and more in the nature of an open-plan spa than human ideas of a bathroom. There was a vestibule where you took off your clothes, a lavatory and cleansing area, massage and salon facilities and the skin conditioning zone.

  Alex, entirely at home in that environment even when it was full of people, stripped off and put his clothes into the laundry, made use of a lavatorial kilt and stood for a while in the cleansing area. This wasn’t a shower. Cleansing mist enveloped you and air-brushes swept you over from head to foot, with a warm, disinfectant light leaving you as clean as you would be from a decontam shower. Moving on to skin conditioning, Alex didn’t need to survey the vast range of products displayed there. When he was with other people he would do the sociable thing, chat about what products they were all using today and try something new, but when he was by himself he just went with his favourite. So he reached for the jar of unscented karafi oil, a light, invigorating oil with a muscle-warming afterglow. Splashing some onto his hands, he began to rub it on his arms and onto his torso.

  TA-rah, ta ra RAAAA!

  ‘Hi, Alex!’ Trilopharus popped up, right in the middle of the room.

  You have got, Alex thought, to be kidding me. I am stark naked. My clothes are eight metres away in the laundry unit. There is nothing here, not a towel, not a tissue.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, placing his hands strategically and attempting a dignified nonchalance. Well, he thought, that answers the question of whether they’re targeting the transmission on me or at the command deck. And as he thought that, he grinned.

  ‘Sorry about that earlier,’ said Trilopharus. ‘Very rude.’ And seeing that Alex didn’t understand and was about to apologise, ‘of me. Getting your cognitive lines crossed like that so you end up answering the wrong person.’

  Ah. Alex had felt at the time that Trilopharus was having a conversation with someone else at the same time, but that was intriguing.

  ‘You’re on more than one call?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Trilopharus sounded surprised. ‘That’s normal for us, several calls at the same time. I can do eight, normally, chatting to people, but people are so interested in the first contact with you and too many of them keep trying to ask me things and tell me things all at the same time. Anyway, I’ll try not to let the lines get tangled again.’ They looked around, the angelic features glimpsed amidst the blinding radiance. ‘This is an interesting room,’ they observed. ‘What do you do here?’

  ‘It’s a room for hygiene,’ Alex said. ‘For relieving bodily waste and cleansing.’

  The radiant head tilted slightly to one side.

  ‘Don’t humans have strong taboos about privacy in such a space?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex, with the broadest of grins. ‘Oh, yes! So with the greatest respect, Trilopharus, may we please meet on the command deck in, say, five minutes?’

  Trilopharus raised a benevolent hand and vanished at once. But Alex could have sworn he heard a giggle.

  Five minutes later, anyway, he was on the command deck, fully dressed and having noted for the log that Trilopharus’s call had found him in the aquadeck bathroom.

  ‘Thank you for coming back,’ Alex said and earnestly, now, ‘I do wish there was some way you could tell the Perithin how very sorry we…’

  ‘Can’t be done,’ Trilopharus said. ‘If anyone was so unmannerly as to ignore their request for isolation, they would only start singing the treforul again right from the start. And given that they’re more than a year into it, best not. So – everything all right here with you?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ Alex said. ‘We’re taking samples of the plant life. Would we be right in thinking that the Cartash used this world for terraforming experiments?’

  ‘No idea,’ Trilopharus responded. ‘It has a Cartash transducer so we know it was one of theirs, but don’t ask me what they did with it.’

  Alex found himself torn, wanting to ask so many different questions at once.

  ‘The transducer?’ he asked. ‘Is that what’s generating the forcefield around the system? And your transmission?’

  Those were not the next questions on the list. But Alex was not the kind of diplomat who stood there with a tick-list.

  ‘Yes, both,’ said Trilopharus and there was a definite chuckle. ‘But don’t ask how it works,’ he said. ‘Because I’m not allowed to tell you.’

  ‘Not allowed?’

  ‘There are rules.’ Trilopharus said. ‘No, not rules. There’s morality. A code of morality that everyone agrees, our core beliefs of right and wrong. And one of the things we just don’t do, won’t do, is to give other people technology that they aren’t ready for. It’s a terrible thing to do to another people, that. Even if they don’t blow themselves to hell with it, it skews their development, throws everything out, makes them dependent, all very bad things. So, the thing I am calling a transd
ucer is off limits till you’ve worked out the principles of it for yourselves. Which, if you keep working away at the data the Gider have given you, you will get to, eventually.’

  A glimmer of insight niggled at the edge of Alex’s brain, bringing together all sorts of tiny bits of knowledge that he’d no time to consider consciously.

  ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘You mean… that’s deliberate? That they’ve given it to us in a form we can’t read?’

  Trilopharus’s head inclined with magisterial splendour.

  ‘Yup,’ they said. ‘Not in a format you can read easily, anyway. If you want to help people, but you can’t and won’t swamp them, then that’s the only way to do it, really – the only way we think is safe and fair and good, anyway. You give them information that will help, but they have to work out how to read it and then study and understand it for themselves, so the discovery is prompted but not handed over on a plate. And all the information that the Gider have given you is either things you could observe for yourself by visiting their world, like information on wildlife, culture-sharing or scientific material just a shade ahead of where you are right now. So you won’t, you know, blow up solar systems doing experiments you’re not ready for.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Alex and was surprised himself to find that he actually meant that. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is absolutely fair en…’

  ‘So, good luck with it,’ Trilopharus said. ‘But don’t ask for help with it, Alex, no can do. We will help with whatever we can, though.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex said. ‘So – can I ask you about the Chambers we’ve found, here?’

  ‘What chambers?’

  ‘Er…’ Alex pulled up the geological scan and put it on a big screen so that Trilopharus could see it. ‘These chambers?’

  ‘No.’ Trilopharus followed the direction Alex had indicated and seemed to be peering, but quickly gave up, ‘I can’t see that,’ they said. ‘Your screens are just wiggles. What chambers, Alex?’

  ‘There are two large underground chambers here,’ Alex said. ‘Ovoid, apparently pressurised, with some kind of crystalline structure in the largest. If they are off-limits, of course, then we will…’

  ‘No, don’t know about them,’ Trilopharus said. ‘Nobody here does. Cartash – possibly storage units? Anyway, whatever it is, it’s yours. Well, Chartsey’s I suppose, they’re the inheritors of the Cartash legacy. But if it was left here by the Cartash then it was left here for you, for their descendants. So, do what you want with it. Anyway – time’s up! See you tomorrow!’

  ‘Dio, Dio,’ Buzz murmured and Alex, sitting down rather heavily, could only nod.

  He was feeling, very definitely, swiped sideways. There was only so much stupendous revelation that the human brain could cope with at once and Alex could feel the numb, stunned feeling of an overload. He just didn’t know which overwhelming idea to focus on and so found he couldn’t think about either.

  ‘Oh – I missed them!’ Silvie came onto the command deck, moments after Trilopharus’s departure and looked disappointed. Then she looked across at Alex and winced. ‘Ouch!’ she protested. ‘Headspin!’

  ‘I know it,’ said Alex, ruefully and did his best to shake it off.

  ‘See you later,’ Silvie said and was retreating from the command deck, only pausing at the top of the ladder to tell him, helpfully, ‘The trees are amazing!’

  Then she was gone.

  Five

  The trees were amazing, as Alex conceded once he was in a mental state to do justice to the bio-sampling reports. This was not, though, for a couple of hours after Trilopharus’s departure. Buzz, seeing how stunned he was, had taken him away for a structured debriefing, sitting down quietly and going through things so that Alex could clear his thoughts and process what had happened.

  ‘I know it’s right,’ he said, when he’d talked out all the ramifications of the Gide Disclosure. ‘I know there’s all this huge pressure to get advanced tech, obviously, to protect ourselves and go to the aid of other worlds under Marfikian domination and I do want that too, obviously I do, if tech was being offered I would have to take it, no question, and be glad of it too for what it could achieve. But they’re right, I know they’re right.’

  Buzz nodded.

  ‘I agree,’ he said, ‘knowledge without understanding is dangerous. We, after all, wouldn’t just hand someone a book on how to build a superlight mix core and let them start building one in their garage. And the Gider have said several times that they can’t help us with the decoding – we just misunderstood why they couldn’t. And now that’s cleared up, I think more people than ever are going to want to work on the GD. It’s a gift and we just have to work together to unwrap it.’

  Alex smiled and they went on then to talk about the other gift – the Cartash legacy Trilopharus had said was theirs, whatever it might turn out to be.

  ‘If it is the Library,’ Buzz said, ‘and Trilopharus has said that its ours, our inheritance – does that change your decision on excavating it?’

  ‘No,’ Alex said at once. ‘No, Buzz. We can’t open it up, we just can’t. It will need experts, a major expedition with all the right gear and all the right people and as long as they need to take to do it right.’

  ‘If we leave,’ Buzz said mildly, playing devil’s advocate, ‘then it may be twenty years before Excorps can get an expedition out here, with all the supplies depots and route-bases they’d have to lay first. And when they do get here, the Veil will prevent them accessing the system. We could be the only ones who ever get the chance to open it.’

  Alex looked at him affectionately, knowing very well what his exec and closest friend was doing there.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we will not. We can ask the Chethari to bring any expedition ship through it, just as they did us. And I am not going to be pressured or guilt-tripped into taking any risk whatsoever with whatever may be in those Chambers, Buzz. Whatever it is, right here, right now, I am its custodian and I have a duty – to the League and to the Cartash – to preserve it.’

  ‘Very good, dear boy,’ Buzz grinned. ‘That’s one you’re going to have to defend,’ he prophesied, ‘both here and when we get home. But if helps, I am with you a hundred per cent.’

  So was Davie, when he caught up with Alex, later.

  ‘Damn straight you have a duty to protect it,’ he said. ‘And if anyone has a problem with that, they can take it up with me. But – interesting, don’t you think?’ He gave Alex a bright, bird-like look. ‘That the Chethari don’t have any records of what the Cartash did here?’

  He had put his finger on a significant point, as Alex discovered the following day. But he was, right then, hauled off by the biology team, desperate to show him the results of the sampling.

  Which was, he had to agree, amazing. They had deployed three probes, one out to an ocean, one to a swamp and one to a high-terrain habitat. What they’d found confirmed Silvie’s suggestion that this planet had been seeded more than half a million years ago with just one species of plant and two fungi and just left to develop how it would. The result was gigantism, truly enormous plants smothering the planet. Even in the most arid areas, brassicas had developed into strange, cacti-like shapes, some like giant spiders frozen in the act of crawling. In more fertile areas a single tree, it turned out, might easily be a hundred kilometres across. What they’d imagined to be separate tree trunks were actually stems sticking up from a far more massive structure down at swamp level, a great tangle of horizontal trunks and roots which went down hundreds of metres.

  This, though, was small fry relative to what they’d identified now as the biggest living organism on the planet. It was the flat-leaved plant which covered the oceans. It was hard to grasp the scale even of the individual leaves from ariel surveys and it was only when they landed a probe on one that it began to sink in just how huge they were. A single leaf might easily be the size of a flickball court, shaped like a shallow bowl and floating on the surface not unlike a water-lily pad.
Underneath, though, was a dense mass of stems, so knotted and inter-woven that they effectively made a raft. And you could, Inga said, hop from leaf to leaf over two thousand kilometres of ocean and still be on the same plant.

  ‘No,’ said Alex, in answer to the yearning look on Silvie’s face. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, philosophical. ‘Pristine environment, nobody goes out, not the first month.’

  ‘Well, if we’re still here,’ Alex promised, ‘you and I will be the first ones in that ocean.’

  ‘Deal,’ she said and grinned.

  She was on the command deck next day when Alex sent the broadcast inviting Trilopharus to visit. She was keen to meet the Chethari and the Fourth was just as keen to find out whether she could see Trilopharus or whether, like Davie, she’d see only confusion.

  TA-rah, ta ra RAAAA!

  ‘Hi Alex!’

  ‘Hello.’ Alex was getting used to this now. He appreciated the fact that Trilopharus was pacing the encounters, calling in for brief visits and leaving them to process and rest before they turned up again. Clearly they had been advised by the Gider, who often found that humans struggled to keep up with even quite casual conversations and might break down in tears if the meeting was too much for them. Trilopharus, Alex knew, was being considerate. ‘I have someone I’d like you to meet,’ Alex said and indicated Silvie, who was standing next to him. ‘This is Silvie, the quarian ambassador.’

  ‘Alex,’ Silvie said, ‘There’s nobody there.’ And as he looked at her, confirmed, ‘There’s just fractals.’

  And at the same time, Trilopharus tipped their head in bewilderment. ‘What’s a quarian?’

  ‘All right – sorry,’ Alex said, holding up his hand to request a moment, ‘Silvie – do you mind?’ He looked at her and saw that she understood.