Zardalu. The light was poor, but those black shapes against the dying sun could be mistaken for nothing else. They were boiling up from the sea, more and more of them, threshing the water with the force of their movements. Within seconds they were ashore.
And ready for action. There was no place to hide as they came gliding forward on splayed tentacles, straight toward Hans Rebka and his three companions.
Back at the seedship, J’merlia had watched the others go with mixed feelings. He certainly wanted to be with his dominatrix, Atvar H’sial, and he certainly was curious to know more about the structures on the shoreline that Kallik had seen. But at the same time he wanted to be left in peace to repair the seedship. It was something that he could do faster and better than anyone else in the group, and their presence would only slow his progress.
He watched them leave, nodding at Rebka’s final order: “If anything happens to us, don’t try heroics. Don’t even think that way. Get the ship up to space where it’s safe, and send that drone back to the Erebus. We’ll look after ourselves.”
Their departure confirmed J’merlia’s conviction that repairs would go faster without them. He had told Rebka and Atvar H’sial that the seedship and drone fixes would be about three hours’ work, but in less than two the drone was ready to fly, the seedship pull patch was in position, the seal perfect, and everything was ready for space. J’merlia tidied up, peered at the sun, and wondered how long it would take them to walk back.
Then it occurred to him that they did not have to walk. The seedship was ready to go to orbit, but it was just as capable of making atmospheric flights, short or long, around the surface of Genizee. In fact, a minimal hop over to the structures that Kallik had described would serve a dual purpose. It would save the others a walk, and it would provide a proof — though he knew that none was needed — that the seedship was back to full working condition.
The ship lifted easily at his command. He took it to ten thousand feet and held it there for half a minute. Perfect. Completely airtight. J’merlia descended to two hundred feet and sent the ship cruising west at a soundless and leisurely twenty miles an hour. Soon he could see the buildings, looming above the flat, sandy promontory. And there, unless he was mistaken, were Kallik and Captain Rebka and Louis Nenda and his beloved dominatrix, Atvar H’sial, standing by the entrance to one of the buildings.
J’merlia was fifty yards from the spit of land, all set to descend and looking forward to their surprise when they saw the carefully repaired and functioning seedship, when the nightmare began: he saw Zardalu, dozens of them, seething up from the dark water. They were on shore — standing upright — advancing fast on Atvar H’sial and the others. And his master and companions had nowhere to go! The Zardalu were in front of them; the steep-sided beach and deep water were on all sides. J’merlia watched in horror as Atvar H’sial turned and led the trapped group into the dark interior of one of the buildings.
They were only thirty or forty paces ahead of the Zardalu. The land-cephalopods came gliding with ghostly speed on their powerful tentacles, rippling across the dark sand. Within a few seconds they, too, had crowded into the first of the buildings.
J’merlia lowered the ship to thirty feet and waited, hypnotized with horror. No one emerged. No sound rose up to his straining ears. The buildings and the sandy promontory remained empty and lifeless, while the sun fell its last few degrees in the darkening sky.
And then there was nothing but darkness. J’merlia wanted to land, but Rebka’s instructions had been quite specific.
Get the ship up to space, where it’s safe. And get that drone back to the Erebus.
A Lo’tfian found it almost impossible to disobey direct orders. J’merlia miserably initiated the ascent command to take the seedship up into orbit, away from the surface of Genizee. He stared down at the world that was fast diminishing beneath him to a tiny disk of light, and wondered what was happening to the four he had left behind. Were they fighting? Captured? Already dead? He felt terrible about leaving.
He launched the little drone without adding to its message, and sat slumped at the seedship control console. What now? Rebka had given no further instructions. He had only told J’merlia what not to do: Don’t try heroics. But J’merlia had to go back and try to rescue Atvar H’sial — except that was in conflict with Rebka’s command.
J’merlia sat locked in an agony of indecision. He longed for the good old days, when all he had had to do was to follow Atvar H’sial’s orders. Why did Julian Graves and the others keep pushing freedom on him, when all it did was make him miserable?
He scarcely noticed when the seedship raced past the artificial moon of Genizee. He was only vaguely aware of Genizee’s sun, off to one side, and the all-around glow of the annular singularities that surrounded the system. And he did not see at all the great swirl of light in space, its vortex moving into position directly ahead of the trajectory of his speeding ship. The first that J’merlia knew of the shifting whirlpool was an unpleasant shearing sensation through his whole body.
Singularity. No time for thought, no time for action. His body flexed, twisted in an impossible direction, turned to smoke.
Isolated essential singularity. Amorphous, physically divergent. J’merlia felt himself stretching, expanding, dissociating. His problems were over now. He would obey Rebka’s command… because the decision had been made for him… because return to Genizee was no longer an option… because he was…
…because he was… dead. With that thought, J’merlia popped out of existence.
THE ZARDALU
You’d think that the spiral arm would have dangers and horrors enough, God knows, without people having to go on and invent new ones. But human (and inhuman) nature being what it is, we’re not satisfied with natural bogeymen, so every world you go, you hear the local tales of terror: of free-space vampires, ship-eaters that suck every living essence from a vessel as it goes by and leave an empty mechanical shell flying on through the void; of computer-worlds, where every organic being that ever approaches them is destroyed; of the Malgaians, baleful sentient planets who so hate large-scale development that when the surface changes become large enough, the Malgaian modifies its environment to kill off the intruders; of the Croquemort Time-well, where a ship can fall in and stay there in stasis until the end of the universe, when planets and stars and galaxies are gone and everything has decayed to a uniform heat-bath; of the Twistors, shadowy forces that live in the strange nonspace occupied by ships and people when they undergo a Bose Transition, performing their Twistor distortions in ways so subtle that you never realize that the “you” going in on one end of a transition and the “you” coming out at the destination are quite different beings.
And then, in a class by themselves, there are the Zardalu.
I say in a class by themselves, for one good reason: unlike all the others, there’s no doubt that the Zardalu are real.
Or rather, they were real. The reference texts tell you that the last Zardalu perished about eleven thousand years ago, when a handful of subject races of their thousand-world empire rose up against them and exterminated them.
That’s the references. But there’s a rumor you’ll find all around the spiral arm, as widespread as greed and as persistent as sin, and it says otherwise. It says: not every Zardalu perished. Somewhere in some hidden backwater of the arm, you may find them still. And if you do, you’ll live (but not long) to regret it.
Now, I’m not a man who can resist a temptation like that. I’ve been bouncing all over the arm for over a century, poking into all the little backwater worlds. Why not gather the scraps of information from all over the arm? I said to myself. Then make a patchwork quilt out of them, and see if it looks like a map with a big X saying “Here be Zardalu.”
I did just that. But I’ll spare you the suspense, right now, and say I never found them. I’m not saying they’re not there; only that I never ran them down. But in the course of searching, I found out a lot of m
ixed facts and rumors about what they were — or are — like.
And I got scared. Forget their appearance. They were supposed to be huge, tentacled creatures, but so are the Pro’sotvians, and a gentler, milder life-form is hard to imagine. Forget their legendary breeding rates, too. Humans can give them a run for their money, in intention and devotion to the job at hand, if not in speed of results. And even forget the fact that they ruled over so many worlds. The Cecropians call it the Cecropia Federation, not Empire, but they control almost as many worlds as the Zardalu did at their peak.
No. You have to look at what the Zardalu did.
It’s not easy to see that. If you’ve ever gone on a fossil hunt for invertebrate forms, you’ll know that you never find one. They decay and vanish. All you ever find is an inverse, an imprint in the rock where the life-form once sat in the mud. It’s a bit like having to look at a photographic negative, with the photograph itself never available.
The Zardalu were supposed to be invertebrates, and in searching for their deeds you have to examine their imprint: what is missing on the worlds that they ruled.
Even that takes an indirect approach. We don’t know where the Zardalu homeworld was, but it is reasonable to assume that they spread out advanced in the biological sciences.
And this is what they did: They conquered other worlds. And as they did so they reduced the intelligence of the inhabitants, bringing them down to a level where a being was just smart enough to make a good slave. No capacity for abstract thought, so no ability to plan a revolt, or cause trouble. And, of course, no art or science.
The Great Rising, from species still undegraded, saved more than their own worlds. If the Zardalu had gone on spreading, their sphere of domination would long ago have swallowed up Earth. And I might be sitting naked and mindless in the ruins of some old Earth monument, not smart enough to come in out of the rain, chewing on a raw turnip, and waiting to be given my next order.
And at that point in my thinking, I reach my main conclusion about the Zardalu: if they are extinct, then thank Heaven for it. The whole spiral arm can sleep better at night.
—from Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort: Jetting Alone Around the Galaxy; by Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)
Chapter Eleven
Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did.
“No, no, and absolutely no,” Julian Graves said. He had reappeared in response to Darya’s call over the ship’s address system, but he had offered no reason for his absence. He looked exhausted and worried. “Even if what you say is true, it changes nothing. So what if the Anfract and the nested singularities are Builder creations? We cannot afford to risk the Erebus and additional members of our party.”
“Captain Rebka and his team are in more danger than we realized.”
“More danger than what? None of us had any idea at all of the degree of danger to the seedship when they left. And we agreed that until three days had passed we would do nothing.”
Darya began to argue, claiming that she had never agreed to any such thing. She called on Dulcimer to support her, but the Polypheme was too far gone, a long unwound corkscrew of apple-green giggling on the hard floor. She tried E.C. Tally. The embodied computer played his visual record of the actual event through the display system of the Erebus, only to prove that Darya had nodded agreement along with everyone else.
“Case closed,” Graves said. He sat there blinking, his hands cradling his bald head as though it ached almost too badly to touch.
Darya sat and fumed. Julian Graves was so damned obstinate. And so logical — except when it came to understanding the complicated train of her own analysis of the Anfract. Then he didn’t want to be logical at all.
She was getting nowhere. It took the unexpected arrival of the message drone to change the mind of the former Alliance councilor. Graves opened it carefully, lifted out the capsule, and hooked it into the Erebus’s computer.
The result was disappointing. There was a continuous record showing the path that the seedship had taken through the uncharted region of the annular singularities, a trip which had been accomplished in less than twenty-four hours. But then there was nothing, an inexplicable ten-hour gap in the recording with no information about the ship’s movements or the activities of its crew.
“So you see, Professor Lang,” Julian Graves said. “Still we have no evidence of problems.”
“There’s no evidence of anything.” Darya watched as the capsule ran to its uninformative end. “Surely that in itself is disturbing.”
“If you are hoping to persuade me that the absence of evidence of a problem itself constitutes evidence of a problem—” Graves began. But he was interrupted.
“Mud,” said a vague, croaking voice. “Urr. Dirty black mud.”
When the message capsule had been removed, the useless outer casing of the drone had been discarded on the control-room floor. It had rolled to rest a couple of feet in front of the open, staring eye of the Chism Polypheme. Now Dulcimer was reaching out with his topmost arm, scratching the side of the drone with a flexible and scaly finger.
“What’s he mumbling about?” Graves asked.
But Darya was crouched down at the side of the Polypheme, taking her first close look at the casing of the drone. All they had been interested in when it reached the Erebus had been the messages it was carrying. The drone itself had seemed irrelevant.
“Dulcimer’s right,” she said. “And so am I!”
She lifted the cylinder and carried it across to Julian Graves. He stared at it blankly. “Well?”
“Look at it. Touch it. When the seedship left the Erebus, all its equipment was clean and in good working order — have Tally run the record, if you don’t believe me. Now look at the antenna and drone casing joints. They’re filthy, and there has been repair work done on them. That’s a replacement cable. And see here? That’s mud. It was vacuum-dried, on its flight back, but before that the whole drone plunged into wet soil. Hans and the others not only found a planet — they landed there.”
“They agreed, before they left, that they would not do that.” Graves shook his bald and bulging head reprovingly, then winced. “Coating material can occur anywhere, even in open space. Anyway, why cover a drone with mud?”
“Because they had no choice. If the drone was battered and muddied like this in landing, the ship must have been damaged.”
“You are constructing a case from nothing.”
“So let me make you one from something. Sterile coating material picked up in space is quite different from planetary mud. I’ll bet if I dig some of this dirt from the drone’s joints and run an analysis, I’ll find microorganisms that don’t exist in any of our data banks. If I do, will you accept that as proof that the seedship landed — and on an unfamiliar world?”
“If. And it is a big if.” But Julian Graves was taking the drone wearily from Darya, and handing it to E.C. Tally.
Darya saw, and understood the significance of that data point. She had won! She moved on at once to the next problem: how to make sure that she was not, for any reason, left behind on the Erebus when others went through the singularities to seek Hans Rebka and his party.
In parallel, Darya’s mind took satisfaction in quite a different thought: She had changed an awful lot in one year. Twelve months before in faculty meetings at the Institute, she would have wasted an hour at that point, presenting more and more evidence to buttress her arguments; and then the subject would have been debated endlessly, on and on, until everyone in the meeting was either at the screaming point or mad with boredom.
Not anymore, though, at least for Darya. Somehow, without ever discussing such things, Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda had taught her a great truth: Once you win, shut up. More talk only makes other people want to argue back.
There was a corollary to that, too: If you save time in an argument, don’t waste it. Start
work on the next problem.
Darya admired her own new acuity as she left the control room and headed for the cargo bay that housed the Indulgence. It was time for work. When E.C. Tally returned with an analysis of that soil sample and Graves made up his mind what to do, Darya wanted to be second only to Dulcimer himself in knowledge of the Polypheme’s ship.
Before she even reached the cargo bay, Julian Graves was calling her back. He had already made up his mind. He knew what had to be done: Darya would fly into the nested singularities. E.C. Tally would accompany her, with Dulcimer as pilot of the Indulgence. Julian Graves would remain on the Erebus. Alone.
Baffling. But say it again: Once you win, shut up.
She grabbed Tally and Dulcimer, hustled them onto the Indulgence, and was heading the ship out of the cargo bay of the Erebus — before Julian Graves had a chance to change his mind.
In her eagerness to leave, Darya did not apply another of Hans Rebka’s survival rules: If you win too easy, better ask what’s going on that you don’t know about.
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.
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