"Paradise," Rebka said suddenly. He turned to Glenna Omar and gave her an admiring smile packed with
sexual overtones. "I'm from Teufel, of course, where the best road you can find is said to be any road that
takes you somewhere else; so some might argue that I'm easily impressed. But I thought that Miranda was
wonderful, my idea of paradise—until I landed here on Sentinel Gate, and learned that I was wrong. This
has to be the most beautiful planet in the whole Fourth Alliance—in the whole spiral arm."
Darya took a deep breath and relaxed—for half a second. Hans was on his best behavior, but Glenna
Omar's response was a good deal too warm.
"Oh, you're just being nice to us, Captain," she was saying. "Of course, I've never been to any of the
worlds of your Phemus Circle, either. How would you describe them to me?"
Dingy, dirty, dismal, and dangerous, Darya thought. Remote, impoverished, brutish, backward, and
barbaric. And all the men are sex-mad.
"I haven't been to all the worlds of the Phemus Circle," Rebka was replying. "But I can tell you what they
say in the Circle about my home world, Teufel: 'What sins must a man commit, in how many past lives, to
be born on Teufel?'"
"Oh, come now. It can't really be that bad."
"It's worse."
"The most awful planet in the whole Phemus Circle?"
"I never said that. Scaldworld is probably as bad, and people from Styx say that they go to Teufel for
vacations."
"Now I'm sure you're joking. If the whole Phemus Circle is as horrible as you say, no one would stay
there. What job do you have, when you're back home?"
"I guess you could call me a traveling troubleshooter. One thing the Phemus Circle is never short of, that's
trouble. That's how Professor Lang"—he nodded to Darya—"and I met. We ran into a spot of bother
together on Quake, one component of a double planet in the Mandel system."
"And she brought you back here, to the Fourth Alliance? Wise Darya." But Glenna did not take her eyes
off Rebka.
"Not right away." Rebka paused, with an expression on his face that Darya recognized. He was about to
take some major step. "We did a few other things first. We and a few others—humans and aliens, plus an
Alliance councilor and an embodied computer—went to one of the Mandel system's gas-giant planets,
Gargantua, where we found an artificial planetoid. We flew through a bunch of wild Phages to get there,
and rescued some of us from a Lotus field. Then a sentient Builder construct put our party through a
Builder transportation system, thirty thousand light-years out of the spiral arm, to a free-space
extragalactic Builder facility called Serenity. When we arrived there, Professor Lang and I—"
He was going to tell it all! Everything! All the facts that the whole party had agreed must remain dead
secret until a high-level approval to discuss them had been granted. Darya tried to kick Rebka's leg under
the table and hit nothing but empty air.
"We found a small group of Zardalu—" He was grinding on.
"You mean, you found people from the territory of the Zardalu Communion?" Glenna Omar was smiling
with delight. Darya was sure that she thought Rebka was making up the whole thing for her benefit.
"No. I mean what I said. We found Zardalu, the original land-cephalopods."
"But they've been extinct for ten thousand years!"
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D...Heritage%203&4%20-%20Transvergence_vBaen.html (7 of 301) [2/4/2004 10:51:15 PM]