“How do you know?”
“Just look at him. He’s swaying.”
“He may be worse later.” Nenda bent down and peered at Tally’s drooping eyelids. “The body’s resting, but he’s not asleep. And this could be our last chance. Give him a jab, Professor, get him going.”
“No.” This time it was Hans Rebka who spoke. “You’re not an expert on embodied computers, Nenda. Neither am I. Tally knows the condition of that body better than any human ever could. If he thinks he has to have rest, he rests. We don’t argue.”
“So what are the rest of us supposed to do? Sit around here, and wait till the Zardalu ring the dinner bell?”
“More or less.” Rebka moved forward and dragged E. C. Tally along the smooth floor, until he could prop him up against a wall.
“We’ve been on the go for days. Every one of us looks ready to drop. We need rest. I’m going to follow Tally’s example and take a short nap. If you have any sense you’ll do the same. We can take turns to keep watch. And if you all want to be ready for action when the Zardalu come back, better make sure you’re not exhausted.”
He sat down by Tally’s side. “Otherwise… Well, otherwise when that bell rings, you may find you’re the first course on the menu.”
CHAPTER 22
Two hours later Darya Lang was alone and prowling the space behind the stasis tanks. Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda had eaten; then Rebka had said with no sign of emotion, “Nice and quiet now. Better get some sleep.”
He and Nenda lay down next to Atvar H’sial. All three dropped off at once, apparently without a care in the world.
Sleep. Darya could no more sleep than she could have breathed fluorine.
She glared at the snoring Hans Rebka. She had been having an affair with a robot, a being who lacked all normal fears and feelings. And Nenda was just as bad, if not worse, lying there flat on his back with his mouth open.
E. C. Tally had remained in an upright position, but the embodied computer was also silent. Darya did not dare to try to talk to him. His brain might be engaged in computation, but his body was resting as best it could. Tally was too far gone for rest to extend to restoration.
The bad thing was that Rebka was quite right, and she knew it. It was important to rest and keep up one’s strength. She had managed to force down a little food, so that was a success. But whenever she closed her eyes the memory of those towering blue-black forms came rushing back, along with a jumble of frightening thoughts. Where were the Zardalu, right now? What was happening to Graves, Birdie Kelly, Kallik, and J’merlia? Were they all still alive?
Finally she gave up any attempt to relax. She left the chamber and went wandering into the surrounding labyrinth of corridors. Even with an imagined Zardalu behind every partition, walking around was better than sitting and watching the others sleep. Her earlier search for Speaker-Between had produced no clear sense of place, and that made her feel uncomfortable. She was a person who needed a sense of spatial context, and now she had a chance to establish one.
It took a couple of hours of systematic search to build up an architectural sense of location. The three-dimensional picture that finally formed in her brain was disconcerting. Darya found that she would reach the end of a corridor, or come out into a broad open chamber, and find viewports set into the walls. They looked out onto vast, open-space structures, long cylinders and spirals and graceful cantilevers of unguessable purpose, arching out beyond the limits of vision. As Nenda said, it would take thousands of years to explore all that complexity — and even longer to understand its function.
But as she walked, the possibility of real exploration also became less and less likely. She could certainly see hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of kilometers of the Builder artifact known as Serenity. But she could not reach them. When she plotted out in her mind the places that she had been able to visit before she came to some kind of blind end, the accessible region shrank to modest proportions. She had been able to move only a couple of kilometers in any direction. Maybe that was the reason Speaker-Between was so confident that their little group could easily be contacted whenever the alien chose to do so.
The other side of that thought was more disturbing: if their movements were so constrained, escape from the Zardalu also became impossible. For if she and her companions could not move freely through the whole of Serenity, no matter where they hid they would be discovered by any determined pursuer.
Darya tried to bury that thought and keep on walking. Another point had been nagging at her subconscious, but for a while she had trouble pinning it down. It came to her only when she began to move back toward the chamber where she had left the others sleeping.
Gravity. The chamber with the stasis tanks had a field of maybe three-quarters of a standard gravity; but now that she was walking “downhill” she realized that for the past half hour she had been traveling through a region of weaker gravitational force. Carry that thought a little further, and it suggested that there had to be some source of gravitational field in the direction that she was now headed.
When Darya came back to the chamber with the stasis tanks she did not stop. Instead she went straight on through, heading toward the region of strongest gravity field.
She squashed another disquieting thought: This is the direction taken by the departing Zardalu. She wished that Tally had told them just where the Zardalu had set up their camp, but she forced herself to keep moving. In less than a kilometer, the field strengthened substantially. The tunnel she walked in branched a couple of times. Each time she followed the “downward” track. The tunnel began to spiral lower in a tightening helix.
Darya paused. The air within all the chambers remained fresh, through a gentle circulation from unknown sources. But now she could feel a stronger breeze blowing. She licked the back of each hand and held them out in front of her, palms facing and a couple of feet apart. The back of her left hand felt noticeably colder. The light wind was coming from that direction.
Darya went forward more cautiously than before. The moving air was strong enough to ruffle her exposed hair. Already she had a suspicion of what she would find. As she followed the curve of the tunnel, she caught a glimpse of movement ahead.
It was a relief to find something familiar — and yet it was still frightening. The dark, swirling vortex ahead of her, no more than thirty or so steps down the sloping path, was a close relative of the one into which she and Hans Rebka had fallen on Glister. It had the same eye-frustrating property as the circulation pattern that had, while she watched, bodied forth Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial and then vanished.
Darya was convinced that she was staring into one end of a space transportation system. But she had no idea where she would be taken if she allowed herself to drop into it, or even if there was any way that she could survive the transition. It did not represent what she now realized she had been hoping to find when she began her wanderings: an escape route from the Zardalu.
The whirling vortex had a hypnotic quality, tempting her to move closer. Darya resisted and backed away. The slope became rapidly steeper, the gravity field stronger and stronger. Half a dozen more steps, and she would be sucked in, no matter how hard she tried to drag herself away.
Would it really take a traveler back to the spiral arm? Or did it lead on to somewhere unknown, and still farther afield? Perhaps at its end lay a true space-time singularity, a maelstrom that would reduce the doomed voyager to independent subnuclear components.
Darya was not willing to find out. But that dark vortex might be a possible last resort, a preferred final alternative to dismemberment by a Zardalu beak. She headed for the chamber where the others lay sleeping.
She went cautiously. The Zardalu were firmly in her mind, to the point where she could think of little else.
No one had said it, but Darya was quite sure that the Zardalu would not leave peacefully, even if they got what they asked for. They would want to be sure that no one could follow them — that no one
knew any Zardalu still existed; the safest way to make sure of that was to get rid of anyone who had met them.
A sudden deep chuckle from behind her made her muscles tense and her heart leap in her chest. She spun around as something gripped her arm.
“Hey, there,” a soft voice said.
It was Louis Nenda. She had heard nothing of his silent approach.
“Don’t you ever do that again!”
“Nervous?” He chuckled again. “Calm down, Professor. I won’t eat you.”
“What are you doing here? Couldn’t you sleep, either?”
He shrugged. “Little bit. Then I woke up. Too mad to get much rest.”
“Too mad?”
“Mad. Angry. Pissed. As I’ve ever been. You saw what that Zardalu did to Kallik.”
“I did. But I’m surprised you feel that way. She was your faithful slave, and you left her to die, down on Quake; and you fired at a ship with her in it, at Summertide.”
“I told Graves and the others, I don’t remember firing on no ship.” He grinned. “Anyway, even if that happened, I didn’t know Kallik was on board, did I?”
“But you admit that you left her to die on Quake.”
“Hell, no. I’d have picked her up before things got too hot. Anyway, that’s not the point. Kallik is my Hymenopt; she belongs to me. What I do with her, that’s one thing. What that blue bastard did to her, that’s something else. It had no right to touch her.” He frowned. “What was its name?”
“Holder.”
“Right. Well, let me tell you, when we have it out with ’em, nobody else touches Holder. That one’s mine. And it’s dead meat. I’m gonna have Holder’s guts fried up and eat ’em for breakfast, even if they make me puke for a week after.”
“You talk big when they’re not here. You were as quiet as the rest of us when they were.”
“I was. And so was Atvar H’sial. Me and her, and Rebka, too, we know how you play this game. You don’t rush in, you don’t act hasty. You watch, and you wait, and you pick your time. Don’t confuse caution with cowardice, Professor.”
Darya looked down at the squat, glowering figure. “You talk a good line, Nenda, but it won’t help when the Zardalu come. They’re three times the size of you, and ten times as strong. And they probably have weapons, and you have none.”
Nenda was turning, getting ready to move on. He gave her a pitying smile. “Sweetie, you may be a smart professor, but you don’t know much about the real world. You think I don’t have weapons? That’ll be the first time, then, since I was a little kid.” He reached down to his calf, and pulled out a long, thin-bladed knife. “This is just for starters. But it’ll do a pretty good to make sausage skin out of Zardalu guts. And if you think that I’m carrying weapons, go take a look at what Atvar H’sial carries around under her wing cases. She’s a real believer in self-preservation. She’s smart, though. She knows you use it at the right time, and not before.”
He winked at her. “Gotta go. Sleep well, now, and sweet dreams. Remember, me and At are here to look after you.”
Darya glared at him as he went on, around a bend in the corridor.
“Watch where you’re going,” she called after him. “There’s a vortex and maybe a field singularity, a few hundred meters that way. I’d be really heartbroken if you fell into it.”
He did not answer. Darya continued to the chamber, oddly comforted by the encounter. Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka had at least one thing in common: so many awful things had happened to them already in their lives, nothing broke their spirit.
E. C. Tally had not moved. But Hans Rebka was awake and sitting up — and Atvar H’sial had disappeared.
“No idea,” Rebka said in answer to her question. “Don’t know about her, or Nenda either. Or you, until you just appeared.”
“I saw Nenda.” Darya gave him a quick recap of her meeting with Louis Nenda, and of her own travels. “But it’s not a safe way out,” she said, when she came to the vortex, and her conviction that it was the entry point to a transportation system. “It’s not useful at all, until we know if it’s meant to take living objects. And it can’t be used even then, until we discover its termination points.”
“I’m not so sure of that. Things are what people think they are. Don’t rule out that vortex.”
He refused to explain. And he said nothing more on the subject, except to add thoughtfully, when Darya complained that Speaker-Between had talked with them just once and then deserted them completely, “Speaker-Between and your vortex have one thing in common, and it’s something we’d better not forget. They are alien, both of them. One of the worst mistakes we can make is to think we understand alien thought patterns — even when it’s a familiar alien. We think it’s hard to know what motivates Atvar H’sial or Kallik or one of the Zardalu; but it’s a thousand times as difficult to know what a Builder or its constructs is trying to achieve.”
“Do you think we and Speaker-Between are misunderstanding each other?”
“I’m sure we are. Let me give you just one example. We’re all feeling angry because we’ve been left here alone, with no idea what comes next from Speaker-Between. We’re upset because we know no way to reach him. But he has been in existence, sitting and waiting, for millions of years! From his point of view, a day — or even a year — is like the blink of an eye. He probably has no idea we’re chafing over his absence.”
He put his arm around her, leading the way to where Tally was sitting silent and with closed eyes.
“Darya, we have no idea when or if Speaker-Between is likely to return. If you didn’t sleep at all, you ought to try again. I caught a couple of hours, and you can’t imagine how much better I feel.” He saw her looking around. “Don’t worry, I won’t leave you sleeping if the Zardalu come back. And I won’t leave. I’ll keep watch right here.”
At his insistence, Darya lay down and closed her eyes. Given their situation, she did not expect to catch even a second of rest. She thought again of the Zardalu, of Kallik’s whistle of pain as her leg was twisted from her body, of the top of Tally’s skull flying across the chamber. Then she recalled Hans Rebka’s calm, pale face, and Louis Nenda’s anger at what had happened to Kallik, and his irrational self-confidence.
We might be as good as dead, she thought, but those two will never for a second admit it.
She opened her eyes and saw Hans Rebka watching over her. He nodded. She closed her eyes again and was asleep within thirty seconds.
Louis Nenda had not gone far after his encounter with Darya Lang. Less than three hundred meters from where she was sleeping, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a small, poorly lit room. Crouched across from him, her carapace close enough for him to reach out and touch, was Atvar H’sial.
“All right.” Nenda’s pheromonal speech pattern diffused across to the waiting Cecropian. “What did you get from the sonics?”
“Less than you hope. In fact, I think it may be wise to share this information with Captain Rebka and Professor Lang. It has no conceivable commercial value.”
“Let me hear it, though, before we decide that.”
“What I saw through low-frequency sonic imaging is probably exactly what you received through your own vision. The external form of the Zardalu is impressively powerful.”
“Nothing new there. One of ’em was enough to hold Kallik.”
“Easily so. The more interesting information came from the whole-body ultrasonic imaging. The necklace of pouches that circles each Zardalu below the main ingestion organ contains, as E. C. Tally reported, young Zardalu in various stages of development. The broad bands of webbing around the upper part of the tentacles conceal no weapons, as I am sure you also suspected, but food and personal belongings. I do not see that as a threat. More important: the Zardalu have twin circulation centers for their body fluids. The main one, that which carries hematic oxygen, was readily accessible to ultrasonic imaging. It lies deep within the center of the main trunk, half a meter below the neck
lace, and half a meter below the surface.”
Atvar H’sial produced simultaneously the pheromonal equivalents of a curse, a sigh, and a mocking laugh. “Regrettably, the heart is not so easily accessible to your knives as to my sonar. It lies deep. The same is true for their brain center, and for the main conduits of their central nervous system. The brain is below the heart, and the nerve column runs down from there, in the centermost line of the body. It is an efficient design for protection from harm, far better than yours or mine.”
“Damnation.”
“I know. I am sorry, Louis Nenda. I was able to read your emotions when Kallik’s leg was torn off, and I share your ambitions. But their realization will call for more than simple violence.”
“What about your weapons? Don’t you have anything that can take ’em out of action?”
“Not permanently. It was difficult to bring effective weapons through the Bose Transition Points.”
“I told Darya Lang you’d blow the Zardalu away.”
“That is, unfortunately, wishful thinking. I have knives, but too short to reach the Zardalu brain or heart. I also have three flash electrostatic devices. Not intended as weapons, but they will inflict a painful surface burn. On something the size and strength of a Zardalu, however, they would be no more than irritants.”
“Forget it. You might as well try and tickle ’em to death. Is that all?”
“I have one device which was not seen as a weapon in the Bose Network. It could serve me well — but at your expense, as well as that of the Zardalu.”
Atvar H’sial reached back under her wing cases and produced a small black ovoid. Nenda stared at it curiously.
“Doesn’t look like much. What’s it do?”
“It’s known as a Starburst. I have two of them. They each produce an intense flash of light in the wavelength range from oh-point-four to one-point-two micrometers. Any creature which sees by means of such radiation will be temporarily or permanently blinded, depending on ocular sensitivity and directness of exposure. I believe that Zardalu eyes operate in that wavelength region. So, unfortunately, do humans’, Lo’tfians’, and Hymenopts’. I, of course, will be unaffected.”
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